X. Period performance
In the last several years, a number of orchestras were founded in an effort to reproduce the original conditions under which a given piece of music was first heard. Up to a point, there is something to be said for this. It can obviously distort the Classical or Baroque composer’s intent if you use voices and instruments on scale or with a timbre adapted to the demands of Wagner or Rachmaninov.
At the same time, it’s possible to be less faithful to the composer’s intent by trying to restore the original working conditions. For composers were frequently frustrated and hampered by the circumstances under which they had to perform their music. In some cases they would write less ambitious music, in other cases they would write whatever they wanted, whether or not the forces at their disposal were up to the task. They would compose for the ideal ensemble.
Not only were composers apt to push the limits of traditional vocalism, they were also apt to push the limits of traditional instrumentalism. They often took an avid interest in technological advances. They wanted singers and musicians to stretch themselves.
Honestly, we just don’t know what Bach or Handel would have made of a modern orchestra, or concert grand, or Franco Corelli, or Kirsten Flagstad. Would they like to hear their music performed by modern singers and musicians? Or would they write a different kind of music altogether?
Another consideration is that a big ensemble has a greater dynamic range that a small ensemble. By this I don’t mean the obvious point that a big ensemble can make a bigger sound. Rather, I mean the reverse. A bigger ensemble (chorus and/or orchestra) can scale down more effectively. It can produce a soft, capacious tone--whereas a small ensemble lacks the full-bodied amplitude to begin with to reduce the decibel level while preserving a well-rounded sound. A small ensemble simply thins out.
It is also a problem for longer works, because the wiry timbre becomes wearing on the ear after prolonged exposure. In addition, the timbre of a period string-player bears a startling resemblance to hillbilly fiddler on a hacksaw!
Music is sound. Period purists act as though you listen to music for the same reason you go the dentist--something you do, not because it’s a pleasant experience, but because it’s good for you.
XI. Inspired paradigms
-1-
In the OT we find a divinely instituted order of worship. What bearing this has on Christian worship is a matter of some contention. The Puritan strain of the Reformed tradition draws a dispensational line between OT worship and NT worship--treating OT worship as purely typical. But there are problems with this position:
i) Calvin himself took a more flexible position. Cf. Douglas Kelly, "The Puritan Regulative Principle and Contemporary Worship," The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, L. Duncan, ed. (Mentor/CFP 2004), 2:63-98.
ii) According to the RPW, whatever is not prescribed is proscribed. The chief prooftext is the Second Commandment. However, the form of the Second Commandment is proscriptive rather than prescription. Hence, the RPW seems to be underdetermined by its primary prooftext. Rather, it’s a prooftext for the Anglo-Lutheran rule of worship--whatever is not forbidden is permitted.
Supporting verses (Num 16; 20; 1 Sam 13; 1 Chron 15:13) adduced to corroborate or illustrate the primary prooftext suffer from the same equivocation of terms, for in each case the infraction in view involves the transgression of an explicit prescription or proscription.
iii) There is, indeed, something inherently contradictory about invoking OT law (the Second Commandment) to forbid OT praxis (the Temple worship).
iv) There is also something self-contradictory about those who insist on exclusive a cappella Psalmnody. They sing what the Psalms say, but they don’t to do what the Psalms say. It is hard to see how this hairsplitting honors the imperative of Scripture. How, in good conscience, can you sing a psalm like Ps 150, which enjoins the singer to praise God with a wide variety of instruments, when you yourself refuse to worship God by any such means? The incongruity is palpable. Is this obedience, or disobedience, to the word of God?
v) Even if we uphold the RPW, this is just an abstract rule-of-thumb. To say "that" whatever is not prescribed is proscribed does not, in fact, say "what" is prescribed or proscribed. That is a question of covenant theology. There’s a risk of invoking the RPW as an exegetical short-cut.
vi) It takes a lot of straining to say that everything associated with the Temple worship was merely typical. How is a choir or orchestra exclusively, primarily, or even apparently typical?
vii) In terms of imagery, there’s a lot of carryover from the OT temple worship to the Book of Revelation. Admittedly, the Apocalypse is highly symbolic; nevertheless, it is symbolic of the New Covenant. Moreover, the apocalyptic scenes of heavenly worship are not a literary construct, like Heb 12, but genuine visions.
viii) John Frame has also said that even if we uphold the elemental/circumstantial distinction, it is misapplied to music, for music is not a constitutive element of worship, but an artistic medium or mode of worship. Hence, to classify it as an "element" commits a category mistake.
In order to deflect the force of OT precedent, Dabney must say that "the church is now not a nation, but a purely spiritual kingdom, which is not of this world," Discussions (Spinkle 1999) 5:325. That would make more sense from the lips of an Anabaptist, but when a covenant theologian must resort to such maneuver, he is allowing his hostility to pipe organs to trump Reformed hermeneutics. This is like poisoning the reservoir to disinfect the water supply. Yes, you kill the bacteria--along with every man, woman, and child.
The point is not that we are bound by inspired precedent to reproduce every detail of OT worship. Clearly a good deal of OT worship was typical. But what was right under the OT doesn’t automatically become wrong under the NT. Remember that the Apostles continued to frequent the Temple. What was once prescribed is at least permissible.
-ii-
At this distance, our knowledge of OT music is naturally limited. But on the basis of Scriptural references (e.g., 1 Chron 15; 23; 25; 28; 2 Chron 5; Ezra 2-3; Neh 12; Ps 13; 20; 38; 118; 136; 149; 150) and comparative musicology (e.g. the Yemenite tradition/Gregorian chant), some things can be said about the character of sacred OT music:
i) Professional. It was composed and performed by a guild of trained musicians (e.g. 1 Chron 25). This implies a couple of things:
a) God values professional standards of excellence. Theology and axiology ought not be opposed.
b) Musical expertise is acquired rather than innate.
ii) Traditional. The guild was dynastic. For example, the "sons of Asaph" constituted a liturgical dynasty that stretches from the Davidic monarchy to the Restoration (1 Chron 25; 2 Chron 20:14; 35:15; Ezra 3:10; Neh 11:17,22; 12:25). This spans a period of about 500 years. In the nature of the case, that would invite the development of a musical tradition in which later composers built on the legacy of their forebears, much like the Bach clan.
iii) Vocal: The Psalter consists of lyric poetry.
iv) Instrumental. OT Temple music employed strings, winds and percussion instruments. This is significant in a couple of respects:
a) If the music was nonmetrical, then the function of the orchestra was not to synchronize the singing.
b) This is obvious from another angle, for the Psalms refer to a wide variety instruments (e.g., Ps 150). Yet you hardly need a number of different instruments to lead choral or congregational singing.
So it seems fairly obvious that the variety of instruments in OT worship served the same function as a modern orchestra. Each type of instrument has a distinctive timbre which, in turn, simulates a different mood or mimics a different natural phenomenon. Although the precise identification of some OT instruments is obscure, yet in general they correspond to strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion instruments.
Hence, instrumental music must have enjoyed a certain independent value--in particular, an affective and aesthetic value.
Since traditional church music is metrical, there is certainly nothing wrong with using an organ to keep the choir or the congregation singing in time and tune. But its justification is not restricted to that utilitarian role.
v) Godward. It exalted the acts and attributes of God. This emphasis runs the length and breadth of the Psalter.
vi) Rational. In a couple of respects, OT music appealed to the mind:
a) OT music was, in part at least, a conscious craft. It wasn’t accidental music (a la Cage, Stockhausen), or strictly spontaneous music.
b) In addition, it set words to music. The words had propositional content.
v) Affective. In a couple of respects, OT music appealed to the emotions:
a) As indicated under (ii), the use of instruments must have been intended to evoke an emotive response in the listener.
b) The imagery and sentiments of the Psalms are often passionate in character.
vi) Edifying. Many of the Psalms take the form of prayers, and, by definition, prayer, both in act and answer, is intended to edify the worshiper. And even apart from vocal music, instrumental music was also valued for its mood-altering effects (1 Sam 16:14-23; 2 Kgs 3:15).
vii) Multimedia. Temple worship appealed to the eyes (vestments, architecture), ears (music), nose (incense), heart and mind (text).
For a fine introduction to the subject, see the article on "Music" in The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, 4:311-24.
-iii-
Turning to NT music, we can say that following:
i) Traditional. The scenes of heavenly worship in Revelation are patterned on the OT Temple worship. Yet Revelation, however, symbolic, symbolizes the worship of the Church Triumphant. So there is continuity between OT and NT forms of worship inasmuch as the latter builds on the foundation of the former.
ii) Vocal. NT hymnody was vocal music (Eph 5:19; Col 3:16; Rev 5:9; 14:3; 15:3). The NT doesn’t mention instrument accompaniment in connection with sacred music. This omission isn’t prejudicial to its propriety. Unlike the OT theocracy, which was a religious state, the NT church consisted of informal little house-churches. And the legal status of the nascent faith was unsettled.
iii) Godward. NT hymnody is theocentric and Christocentric in subject-matter (Eph 5:19-20; Col 3:16).
iv) Rational. According to Paul, Christian music should have an intellectual appeal (1 Cor 14:15). So we should avoid musical modes of expression that bypass the mind. Raw repetition, whether in fast or slow music, has this numbing effect. So does very freeform music.
v) Edifying. In this same chapter, Paul accentuates the importance of personal edification. So it matters what affect music and other elements of worship are having on the worshiper.
It is easy for folks, especially in the Reformed tradition, to be suckered by a bogus theocentrism, to say that worship is about God, not about the worshiper. They make the act of worship seem merely effortful and dutiful act of the will.
This may sound pretty pious, but it amounts false piety, for from a truly Reformed perspective, God commands our worship, not because he needs it, but because we need it. To be a creature is to be needy, to be dependent on God for all things. Worship is a humble and thankful acknowledgement of our finitude and fallenness in relation to God’s greatness and goodness.
How worship makes the worshiper feel does matter, for it matters how we feel about God. To offer up a cold-hearted song of praise is not an act of gratitude, but hypocrisy--going through the motion, keeping up appearances. Nothing could be more alien to the Psalter, which is a passionate, God-intoxicated, soul-bearing book.
We need to distinguish the objective of worship, which is the edification of the worshiper, from the object of worship, which is the Trinity. It is important to do justice to both the horizontal and vertical axes of worship. In their reaction to "entertainment-oriented" worship-styles, some Christian critics slight the subjective impact of music as if that consideration were unscriptural or unspiritual.
XII. Traditional paradigms
-i-
The music of Bach exhibits the greatest architectonic finesse of any composer. At one level, Bach is a more linear composer than Handel inasmuch as Bach has one or more melodies which carry through an entire piece or movement, whereas Handel is more segmented, alternating between one melody and another. At another level, Bach is vertical as well as horizontal in his polyphonic stacking of the melodic materials.
His tunes are ordinarily more angular, and his rhythms more recurvacious, than the symmetrical style of Handel, with his elegant sense of balance.
If I were banished to a desert island, with only one composer to keep me company, it would be Bach. I would take the precaution of having a well-equipped desert island, with a solar-powered CD player and waterproof cassette case!
Bach made a famous pilgrimage to see Buxtehude. The older composer writes in shorter musical units--a more impromptu style, with sudden mood swings from one movement to another. Some of his organ chorale preludes capture a private, prayerful state of mind--like a chapel of the soul.
Pachelbel also wrote some fine organ music, but not on quite the same plane as the best of Buxtehude--much less of Bach. Telemann is another lovely melodist--which is one reason he could write so much so fast.
Vivaldi’s music is often rather birdlike. This onomatopoetic facility is on broader display in his over-performed Four Seasons. Vivaldi is best known for his fast movements, but his slow movements are just as fine.
The main difference between Handelian opera and oratorio is the greatly augmented role of the chorus in oratorio. Handel was equally the master of solo and ensemble writing. However, his operatic arias are, on balance, a cut above the arias written for his oratorios. The compensation comes with the unrivaled choral writing. And Handel, in his setting of the plagues of Egypt, as well as some of the Chandos anthems, also tries to create a musical analogue of meteorology.
-ii-
These are the three leading composers of the Baroque era. They are all unmistakable Baroque, and yet are all unmistakably distinctive. This implies that the Baroque style was not exhausted when composers like C.P.E. Bach transitioned to the Classical era.
There is such a thing as a Baroque style, just as there is such a thing as a Classical style, whereas it’s harder to isolate a Romantic style. You have the loss of a musical lingua franca, with the result that the composers of genius each invent an idiosyncratic style, which is not reducible to a musical school with recognizable proteges. This fragmentation carries into the 20C as well.
A solid generic style can give a composer of limited means the guidance he needs to write decent music. There are a number of fine minor Baroque composers. They are eminently listenable because the style saves them from their natural limitations.
Likewise, Rachmaninov normally ground out fancy finger-exercises under the guise of real music, but when he turned to composing sacred music, the traditional idiom enabled and constrained him to write some really nice music for a change.
Composers are experimental. They like to try something new. That’s fine if it works. But scaffolding is no substitute for a Gothic cathedral.
-iii-
The top names in the Classical period are Mozart and Haydn. In my opinion, Mozart is somewhat overrated while Haydn is somewhat underrated. Mozart’s genius is obvious: instant melodic invention, achingly beautiful tunes, a natural feel for the voice, facile mastery of all musical forms, dramatic sympathy with his operatic characters, a virtuoso’s touch with keyboard music.
But all this facility comes at a cost. There’s a somewhat formulaic quality to his writing. You always know which note is coming next. The gossamer thin transparency of his musical texture is both a plus and a minus--like a Nordic ice-queen who is beautiful to behold, but cool to the touch.
Haydn, lacking quite the same effortless ease, had to work harder at his craft, and as a consequence his music is rather more daring and substantial.
The Classical era made some advances in the variety of musical forms, but the style is less flexible than the Baroque, and in that respect, signals step backward rather than forward.
-iv-
Music of the Romantic era is highly eclectic and uneven. In my opinion, there is no first-rate Italian music from this period. Rossini had a lot of facility, but a lack of taste and earnestness. Verdi was a more serious composer, and his music is very singable, but you have only to compare it to the Italian Baroque to see the loss of good taste. Still, there’s some interesting music in his Requiem, as well as Otello. A Puccini aria is just an extension of Puccini recitative. Most of his vocal writing is recitatival--a throwback to plainsong.
French music from this period is very hit-and-miss, with a lot of hackwork. However, it is with Berlioz that French music begins to find its own voice. French Baroque and Classical music were dehydrated versions of German and Italian exemplars.
When Berlioz tries to write in big forms, the result is a lot of empty bombast. But in more intimate music, such as his great song cycle (Les Nuits d’été), he becomes the forefather of Impressionism.
An exquisite transitional figure is Faure, who unites neoclassical form with a romantic-cum-impressionist affect. Faure’s expressive range is fairly limited, given his lyrical disposition, but flawless within its narrow range--especially in small forms: art songs, chamber music, piano sonatas, and his incandescent Requiem.
German music from this period is also very hit-and-miss, with a lot of boilerplate. But in Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann on a good day, you again have the greatest music since the German Baroque.
Beethoven is the most fiery of the five, which makes it easy to forget that he is a composer of great intimacy and delicacy as well.
There is a certain pattern to many of his compositions. You have a stormy first movement, followed by a transitional second movement, which represents a reflective rite of passage, followed by a triumphant third movement.
The third movement is illustrative of his indomitable optimism, projecting the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. We have clearly shifted from the theocentric gravity of Bach to the androcentric gravity of the Romantic era in general--not merely in music, but in art and literature as well.
To turn Beethoven into the Apostle and prophet of humanism is, though, something of an overstatement. He considered the Missa Solemnis to be his finest work.
Mendelssohn is just the opposite. Few composers are more complete than Mendelssohn in his tool-kit of innate taste, melodic invention, and consummate craftsmanship. He has certain limitations. His melodies are not as consistently memorable as Schubert’s. And his temperament is more lyrical than dramatic.
Mendelssohn was a Messianic Jew, deeply indebted to Lutheran music, and some of his music is not merely Christian, but a pioneering exercise in musical apologetics.
You can see this in his oratorio trilogy: St. Paul, Elijah, and Christ. St. Paul was Judaism’s most influential convert to the Christian faith, while Elijah was the forerunner to Christ. In this way, Mendelssohn shows that Christ is the fulfillment of OT promise, and its fulfillment receives confirmation in the witness of St. Paul.
You can see that same strategy at work, not only between, but within, the oratorios. In his fragmentary Christus, unfinished at his death, his famous chorus "Es wird ein Stern aus Jacob," begins with a setting of classic Messianic prooftext from the OT (Num 24:7), then transitions to an arrangement of an old Lutheran hymn, based on the stellar iconography of Christ in the Apocalypse (Rev 22:16), thereby rounding out the stellar motif.
Mendelssohn died in his thirties, and there is, in much of his religious music, a rarefied serenity that I’ve not encountered in any composer--not even in Bach. This heavenly-minded mood sounds the note of a musical premonition.
A neglected composer who moves in much the same musical groove is Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of the John Wesley. A Christian composer, his musical output, while limited, is high quality, and worthy of revival.
Schubert was the most gifted composer since Mozart. He lacks the self-conscious craftsmanship of some composers. For him, that hardly matters since Schubert basically picked it up by ear, being imbued in a musical tradition. Unlike Bach, he is not a composer’s composer. You can’t learn the craft from Schubert because his musical art is too unmediated.
-v-
Brahms, by contrast, was another master of the craft. Indeed, Brahms was an amateur musicologist. A creative artist, to be successful, must learn to strike a balance between subconscious inspiration and conscious craftsmanship.
The tendency of the young artist is to be more inspired, but less finished--of the older artist to be more finished, but less inspired. The danger with Brahms is having the conscious art overwhelm subliminal spontaneity. And that sometimes happens.
However, Brahms was a severe critic of his own work. He almost always writes high quality music, but there are times when it comes across as a bit pedantic or overwritten. Yet, at other times, the craftsmanship is sufficiently sublimated that the music seems to write itself. Everything falls into place--like leaves turning during an Indian summer’s day.
Rules restrict creative freedom, but without some such restriction, the freedom to do anything is the freedom to do nothing, for infinite possibilities in every direction offer the creative artist no particular place to begin, or guidance in where to take a creative idea.
When the rules are good rules, when the rules formalize the natural order, and when inspiration falls into the groove, then the creative process unfolds with an irresistible, inevitable and flawless inner logic.
-vi-
Romantic music does more with timber than Baroque music--exploiting to a greater degree the distinctive timbre of each instrument, in solo or ensemble.
One of the glories of Bach is that you can transcribe his music from one instrument to another, and it will still sound terrific. Therein lies the power of abstract structure.
You could never do this with Brahms or Debussy. To that degree, Romantic music marks an advance of Baroque music inasmuch as it cultivates a potential which was not as fully realized in Baroque music.
This is a difference of degree rather than kind. Bach does wonderful things with flute, trumpet, and oboe. He, too, has an ear for timbre.
And this is not to say that one emphasis is better than the other. For here we are faced with a creative dialectical tension or trade-off between the abstract universal and the concrete particular.
Take Pelleas et Mellisande. This is a perfect work of its kind. Ironically, it takes immense concentration to compose in this apparently asymmetrical style. The story is set in a forest, and the style exactly matches the atmospheric mood of a forest. This is another example of music’s mimetic facility.
The score itself is lovely, yet there’s a sense in which you could drop the needle anywhere without knowing where you in the progress of the opera. One is tempted to say that you could perform the score in reverse and have the same effect.
And, in a way, this omnidirectional quality also fits in with the timeless setting of a fairy-tale. For a fairy-tale, unlike a historical novel, exists nowhere in particular, and can therefore exist anywhere the imagination takes it.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Music: sacred & profane-3
But this placement comes at a cost. To sing so comfortably above staff, you tend to bottom out below the staff. You can sing the higher roles, but not the heavier roles. And the middle voice may be rather less centered or settled.
Each ages about as well as the other. Which one prefers is a matter of taste. As a rule, I think that the top-down approach is rather more suitable to the range and coloration of a true soprano. It doesn’t sound like a mezzo on a mountain hike. But the choice depends in part on natural endowment. And we get something from each which we don’t get from the other. The bottom-up approach satisfies a certain sensuous craving, like a four-course meal.
Incidentally, it is often said that bigger voices are harder to record than smaller voices. That isn’t true. The problem is that recording engineers have a tin ear. They are not into tonality, but technology, electronics rather than acoustics. In addition, most conductors are musicians instead of singers, so they are just as tone deaf to the demands of vocal reproduction.
The way to record a big voice is put the singer in a fairly reverberant space, and position the microphone far enough away to catch the full resonance of the voice. This is why live recordings are often superior to studio recordings. In the usual studio recording, the voice is boxy, but the orchestra has a lot of depth because the conductor is less attuned to vocalism than instrumentalism. For him, the voice is just another instrument, to be woven into the whole.
A soprano with a pure head tone has a tinny, girlish or boyish sounding voice. German and English sopranos incline in this direction. Conversely, a woman with a raw chest voice makes a mannish, raucous sound.
What is true of female voices is true, to a lesser degree, of male voices. Pavarotti has a higher placement than Domingo. The production is sunny, resonant, and free, but not as rich as the baritonal lining on Domingo’s instrument, which can also take on heavier parts. Caruso, Domingo, and Melchior are all classic bottom-up voices.
This is also a matter of taste. For some listeners, the ideal tenor sound is a timbre which has no residual trace of baritonal coloring. It doesn’t range along the same continuum as the bass or the baritone. For this ear, a Gigli or Bjorling is optimal.
But for another pair of ears, too much head-tone makes the male voice take on a somewhat androgynous or effeminate quality. Lauri-Volpi used to say that Gigli sang like a girl! There is no doubt an element of professional rivalry in that barb. Nevertheless, which one would you rather have as your tail-gunner?
The Italian tenor is the star of the operatic constellation. He appeals to men and women alike, but for unlike reasons. Men see themselves in the role of the lover, while women see themselves in the role the belovéd. I also suspect that men are more likely to identify with a dramatic tenor, and women with a lyric tenor.
Moving further down the scale, Warren has a higher placement than Merrill. Indeed, some suspect that Warren was a lazy tenor, living in safety. This makes for wonderful clear and easy top notes, but the timbre is not as warm and round or well-centered when he comes down from the clouds.
Likewise, Ghiaurov has a higher placement than Talvela, Kipnis or Kurt Moll. This makes for spacious high notes with thin low notes, whereas the equation is rather the reverse in the case of Moll and Talvela. They have punchy high notes, but not the same amplitude. There’s a difference between a loud sound and a voluminous sound.
-ii-
There are exceptions to the above. Nilsson had a high heavy voice. This also raises the vexed question of the relation between tongue, technique, and vocal range. Was it a matter of her vocal endowment, vocal technique, Finnish language, or some combination thereof? Hard to say since she’s the only Finnish singer of her kind.
On a related note, many singers use the same technique in every role. This is especially the case for German and Italian singers, for they can make a career of singing exclusively in their national repertory.
Some singers vary their technique. I classified Milanov as a bottom-up soprano. But she also had a way of singing soft, high-lying phrases by detaching the head register, thereby allowing the downward weight of the chest register to drop out of sight, leaving a sustained pianissimo which seemed to be suspended in thin air.
Caballe is another singer famous for her pianissimi. Sutherland has said that she can do the same thing, but when she tries, it’s hard for her to get her full voice back. So this, again, illustrates the tradeoff between one method and another.
Corelli used just enough laryngeal manipulation to produce a very big, full sound, but he kept the larynx sufficiently free that, unlike del Monaco, who always sang with a low larynx, Corelli also had easy high notes and a lot of dynamic variation--even a high pianissimo.
-iii-
The two key components of vocal technique are placement and breathing. The right way to breathe is less a matter of what to do, than what not to do. Inhalation requires no muscular effort, for the vacuum left by exhalation is automatically replenished by the spontaneous equalization of the deflated lungs with external air pressure.
Certain postures and clothing styles which inhibit abdominal breathing as well as the natural expansion of the rib cage and chest cavity are to be avoided. On the other hand, a tense, rigid military posture should also be avoided. The classic hip-lock stance, with an easy upright posture, is conducive to deep breathing. Unless a man makes his living as a drag-queen, I would strongly advise him against wearing a corset!
Jerome Hines has made the unusual suggestion that a singer not take an extra breath before he begins to vocalize. According to Hines, we don’t take a breath before we speak, and singing emits less air than speaking. On his theory, you breathe deeply by not taking a deep breath. For when you spontaneously exhale, you automatically lower the diaphragm. Since Hines sang his last role at the tender age of 77, see if his technique works for you.
In some churches, you sit, rather than stand, to sing. But standing is better for support.
In some trendy, "seeker-sensitive" churches, there are no printed hymnals, the music being projected onto a screen. This forces the singer to cock his head, stretching the neck muscles and tensing the throat. Except for the occasional high note, you’ll never see an opera singer cock his head back.
Of course, the music as such a church is ordinarily so abysmal, consisting of lullabies and patter songs, that a real voice would embarrass and overwhelm the materials. In this situation, it is probably best to mimic the delivery of a superannuated pop star who talks his way through the number with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
-iv-
Singers are often criticized for their mushy diction. This takes two forms: slurring consonants and distorting vowels. Now, some singers take this to an unnecessary extreme. There is, however, a reason for this, and music critics or choir conductors who obsess over elocution misconceive the medium. It would profit the average "music minister" to become a vocal coach as well as a musician.
Now, although singing is an extension of speech, it is not the same thing as speech. The phonetics of speech are not adapted to vocalism. Just as an athlete will modify the way he moves or breathes, a singer will modify his speech patterns to produce, project, and sustain a singing tone. What works for John Gielgud won’t work for Joan Sutherland!
In particular, singers tend to broaden narrow vowels on high notes. For example, men will sing a long "e" as a short "i," or even shade it towards an "ay" sound, while women will sing a long "e" as an "ah."
Likewise, many singers will sacrifice distinct consonants for the sake of legato. There is more to this than bel canto. It is less of a strain on the vocal chords to sing legato than marcato.
Lieder singers make a virtue of necessity. Because they lack the vocal endowment to make it in grand opera, they work on idiomatic pronunciation and other expressive refinements. For their part, aging singers exaggerate the consonants to conceal their inability to sustain the vowels.
-v-
Some singers age better than others. This is partly a question of solid technique as well as resisting the temptation to sing parts that are too high or heavy for the voice.
Singers tend to learn their vocal technique by ear. It is not uncommon for young singers to rely on their natural endowment and direct auditory feedback. This can lead to a vocal crisis later on. By the time they learn how to consciously or properly produce their instrument, the baby-fat is off the voice.
A singer’s instrument is also more vulnerable to a personal or emotional or medical crisis than a pianist or violinist. The singer is his own medium. This can also precipitate a vocal crisis.
In a way, there is no such thing as vocal technique, in the sense of a uniform set of rules that can be instilled to yield reliable results. Many great singers become voice teachers when they retire, but very few of their students become great singers. So it’s not something that can be passed on.
Like any athletic endeavor, two men may have the same basic physical equipment, but one in more intuitively in touch with his body than the other. He has a better sense of balance. He can process the signals his body is sending him. Likewise, some great singers are less technically self-aware than others, which may be one reason they make poor teachers.
For some reason, most great singers are, to put it politely, overweight. Indeed, that’s often an understatement. You might think this would create problems for breathing and support, but it doesn’t seem to have that effect--not, at least, until the drag-factor of age begins to exact its revenge.
Yet it can be a problem when the libretto calls on the tenor to pick up the soprano and bear her away in his loving arms as the curtain falls. One soprano was said to be so obese that it took two separate trips to carry her off the stage!
To some extent, vocal preservation may be an illusion. The standard repertory rarely takes a soprano above high C. Yet a number of sopranos, at least in their prime, can singer higher than that, which leaves them with a margin to spare as gravity begins to transpose the range. Although they may lose a high note or two, the repertory still lies within their remaining range. In fact, for a time they may sound even better, for they can still hit the high notes, but the voice is fuller in their forties than it was in their twenties.
There is a popular notion that high voices age less well than low voices. But the recording medium doesn’t bear that out. It is true that the aging process is apt to reduce the upper extension, but this applies to low voices as well as high voices. Each category has a natural range. For a bass, a top F is the equivalent of a top C for a tenor or soprano. And it is not uncommon for the aging process to nibble away at both ends.
Top-down voices hang onto their high notes, but lose the middle voice and lower register while bottom-up voices keep--or even augment--the low-to-mid-range, but lose the high notes. Likewise, bottom-up voices are likely to remain firmer for longer, while top-down voices become unsteady in the middle voice, keeping the head voice intact, but coming apart at the break.
At the same time, the tenor or soprano line is more exposed for a high voice than a low voice. So any diminution is more conspicuous.
IX. Vocal writing
-i-
Some composers are better at writing for voice, others at absolute music. The short list of great vocal composers must number Handel, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Schubert--among others. The short list of great instrumental composers must number Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms--among others.
In my opinion, Bach is the greatest instrumental composer, and greatest composer in general, while Handel is the greatest vocal composer, and Mozart is the greatest operatic composer.
This is a difference of degree. One mark of a great composer is that he will excel in vocal and instrumental music alike. And although it’s quite possible to write fine vocal music without instrumentation, and fine instrumental music without vocalization, I would say that a cappella choral music has more to lose from the absence of instrumentalism than instrumental music from the absence of vocalization.
There is, indeed, a certain creative tension between a vocal and an instrumental bias. As I said before, playing a piano scoring of vocal music is a good test of vocal music qua music. I think it not incidental that Handel, Mozart, and Mendelssohn were all keyboard virtuosi. Schubert is something of an exception to the rule, but if you have enough raw talent you can write your own ticket.
Beethoven has a reputation for cruel vocal writing. Actually, Beethoven can write well for the voice when he wants to, but for Beethoven, the musical idea is ordinarily in the ascendant.
The same is true with respect to Bach. For Bach, the abstract structure is paramount. If you listen to the average Bach aria, it’s very beautiful, but if you separate out the vocal line from the accompaniment, the vocal line is often rather jerky and nondescript. The real beauty and distinction lies in the matchless accompaniment. That is what fires his imagination. Indeed, it is something of a misnomer to call it the "accompaniment."
For Handel, it’s rather the reverse. He has a natural feel for the human voice. But his purely instrumental writing is often less distinguished--almost workaday fare. For example, his overtures, written in the Italian style, are tasteful and eminently listenable, but not on the same plane as Corelli or Albinoni. You get a sense that Handel is going through the motions.
Handel wrote some very fine organ concerti, but that’s because he was a keyboard virtuoso, so that particular form engages his musical imagination in a way that orchestral writing does not. His concerti grossi are impressive because they’re meant to impress. Composers like to write in every form, just to prove that they can do it--not because they’re equally good in every form.
What gets Handel really fired up is a good libretto. He needs that to get his creative juices flowing. In this he differs from Bach and Schubert alike. Schubert could set a shopping list to music. So could Bach. But for Handel, dramatic imagination inspires musical imagination.
It’s not that the words are unimportant to Bach. But it’s more a case of bringing his musical art to bear on the text, rather than the text inspiring his musical art.
In rating their vocal music, I’d say that Handel composes greater vocal music qua "vocal" music, but Bach writes greater vocal music qua vocal "music." Bach approaches the task of vocal writing with an instrumental ear, but the supremacy of his musical genius makes for a greater overall effect.
-ii-
Is there an ideal vocal style? This question raises yet another question: does a composer adapt himself to the voice, or the voice to the composer?
Whatever the style, you can find some singers who are up to the demands of the music. Handel requires florid facility for all vocal ranges. Some modern-day singers have it, others not. In general, his music requires no great range or power--unless he’s writing for an exceptional singer like Montagnana.
Some Mozartian roles make great demands on the singer’s range. Again, some singers have the requisite range, others not. A few of his roles have demanding scale-work, but this is less common in Mozart than Handel or Vivaldi. And you don’t need a big voice to sing Mozart.
The vocal range of Wagner is somewhat beyond Handel, but not by much. Obviously, Wagner is not a fan of florid music. What his music requires is sheer vocal volume to compete with the orchestra. Melchior, Flagstad, and Nilsson are up to the demands of the lead roles. But that’s about it.
Russian choral music needs a bass that can drop down to low C or B flat, even the occasional F below low F.
Are composers writing for a preexisting voice, or can the human voice adapt to the demands of the new music? And does the native language condition the voice for a certain range or facility?
What would Handel have done with a Flagstad or Melchior? If Wagner didn’t exist, Flagstad would have to invent him!
In the past, a dramatic soprano would have sung mezzo or alto, and a Heldentenor the baritone roles.
Retired singers have a habit of treating the last generation--which is to say, their own generation, as the golden age, after which the vocal art went to pot. And there’s no doubt that in a post-Woodstock age, going to pot may aptly describe the lifestyle of some singers.
However, great singing seems to come and go in cycles. Melba’s scale-work was no better than Sutherland’s, while George Bernard Shaw says that Patti was better at legato than coloratura.
Sometimes a composer will write with a particular singer in mind--Handel for Montagnana, Mozart for Fischer and Constanze Weber. Billington could sing an A in alt, while Agujari could sing a C above high C.
Several things may account for this. Since baroque divas were competing with the castrati, it seems not unlikely that they may aspired to a more boyish, bell-like, flutelike timbre, rather than the big bosomy tone of a modern soprano. To judge by contemporary accounts, Catalani seems to have been the first dramatic soprano.
The castrato connection may be more specific. From Mustafa, one of the last of the castrati, Calvé picked up a vocal trick or "fourth voice," which was special sort of high voice, above the ordinary head voice.
Victorian divas were singing in a corset. You can’t sing from the diaphragm is that attire. It would be impossible to inhale and intone like Flagstad under such conditions. This may be one reason why the divas had a more girlish timbre back then.
Related to this, abdominal breathing expands the chest cavity. It isn’t merely that opera singers pile on the pounds over time. They also become broader across the beam.
In addition, women used to make their operatic debut in their teens, if not earlier. In this regard, Patti was especially precocious, making her debut at the tender age of seven! Nowadays, women make their debut in their twenties--and it often takes another ten years to achieve stardom. Obviously, the range and timbre of a teenager may be different from that of a grown woman, but if a woman began her career in the teens, she was apt to maintain the girlish timbre through--as you can hear in records of Melba and Patti.
Finally, improvements in diet have made modern men and women larger than their forebears. You can see this in old photographs.
George Bernard Shaw, under the spell of Wagner, bullied Jean De Reszke, the primo tenore of the day, into singing Siegfried and Tristan, soon after which De Reszke went into steep vocal decline. Ironically, Shaw later lost his infatuation with Wagner. But a music critic can outlive his critical misjudgments, whereas a vocalist cannot outlive his vocal misjudgments.
Yet all the blame cannot be laid at Wagner’s feet. If you compare the sound of a modern opera singer with old recordings of Victorian singers, it is clear that the 20C audience has developed an appetite for a bigger, fuller sound than was once the case, even in Wagner’s time, and there are singers willing and able to accommodate their taste.
Nowadays, a tenor lives and dies by his high C. But until the time of Duprez (1806-96), tenors resorted to the head register when taking their high notes. In Bellini’s I Puritani, the tenor line rises to F above high C. Duprez, an otherwise undistinguished tenor, changed all that when he make a career of taking the high C from the chest.
But the tenor voice paid a toll when it crossed that bridge. Verdi and Puccini write lower tenor parts than Rossini and Bellini. There are ever some early Verdi arias in the old tradition. In spite of that, precious few tenors have a good high C. There are men with a naturally high range, but they usually lack chest resonance; then there are men with the resonance, but they lack the reach. They are really high baritones. It is rare to find a man who can place the voice high, with real chest resonance, and still sound at ease. Among postwar tenors, Corelli and Pavarotti are the most successful. Domingo is very fine, but there are times when you suspect that he’s a pushed-up baritone (same with Caruso and Melchior), while Leonard Warren sounds like a Heldentenor on a holiday.
This is also a question of technique. Caruso and Melchior sang with a low larynx, which makes it possible to carry the chest register quite high. But the effect is somewhat effortful.
Frankly, there’s no way to make the modern tenor sound entirely natural. It is the most artificial vocal category. For the opera buff, some of its appeal lies in this high-wire act. Will the tenor crack on the high C or burst a blood vessel in the process? For my taste, the tenor voice is a bit too overbred to be quite manly. When you take the wolf out of the dog, you end up with one of those nippy yippy lap-dogs.
The Verdi baritone must have a solid high G, as well as the odd A flat and A natural. But it retains a drop of wolf blood in its veins, which is why I prefer the growling sound of a high baritone to the yippity-yap-yap of the tenor.
-iii-
What are we to make of all this? In terms of ideal vocal writing, it is probably best to compose music which a good voice with good technique can sing, rather than write music which only a freak of nature can sing.
And even when you can find a freak-mutant to fill the role, the overall effect may still be less than entirely pleasing. Extremely high voices tend to sound rather adolescent, while extremely big voices are so godlike that they lose the human touch. This is why many connoisseurs prefer Frida Leider to Flagstad, or Crespin to Nilsson, in the big Wagnerian roles.
One reason Joan Sutherland was so popular and so exceptional is that she could combine the acuti with a very warm and womanly middle voice. Indeed, that was part of her technique--a plump middle voice which she carried all the way up to a high B natural, before flipping into the head register for the acuti.
At the same time, we can take a cue from the ad libitum character of Baroque music. If a singer happens to have an exceptional high range or low range or trill or whatever, let the singer embellish or interpolate where appropriate.
It would be best if a tenor not sing any higher than he can comfortably sing in the chest register. For purposes of choral music, say, the composer shouldn’t say the tenor line above the range of a Verdi baritone.
For purposes of hymn writing, the average untrained voice has little more that an octave of usable range--say, between a lower C and an upper D. Occasional excursions above and below this are okay, but the tessitura should stay within this general range.
It would free things up if more congregations could do part-singing. Learning to sight-sing would benefit untrained voices, since unison singing means that everyone must tackle the treble line.
Many hymnals are pitched too high. But in the age of the digital organ, it hymn can be transposed at the flip of a switch.
Choral singing can be rather more ambitious, but less so than operatic writing. The average choir is always underrepresented in the tenor section. Most amateur sopranos can’t ascend above the staff with ease, although you often have a natural high soprano or two. It’s probably best to have an alternate line or optional descant for high sopranos. The bass part tends to run a tad high for a true bass and a tad low for a true baritone. It also depends on whether we’re talking about a church choir or professional choir.
It’s an oddity of traditional choral writing that that the range of the alto part is so narrow while the range of the bass part is so wide. As a rule, an alto has a naturally longer voice than a bass, because she can sing in both registers. Choral writing ought to reflect that.
The reason it doesn’t is, I suppose, because a number of the great composers took the keyboard (organ, piano, harpsichord) as their primary instrument. They compose a chorus the way they’d write for the keyboard, where the outer voices frame the music. The soprano line reprises the right-hand, supplying the melody--while the bass line reprises the left-hand, supplying the harmony. The inner voices (alto, tenor) are the musical scavengers, gobbling up the leftover notes.
Certainly keyboard technique has a lingering impact on compositional style. The orchestral "repeat" is a throwback to the two-manual (loud/soft) harpsichord.
To some extent, this also has a prehistory in antiphonal singing, with opposing double-choruses--such as you see at San Marco. And that format goes all the way back to the Psalter.
Each ages about as well as the other. Which one prefers is a matter of taste. As a rule, I think that the top-down approach is rather more suitable to the range and coloration of a true soprano. It doesn’t sound like a mezzo on a mountain hike. But the choice depends in part on natural endowment. And we get something from each which we don’t get from the other. The bottom-up approach satisfies a certain sensuous craving, like a four-course meal.
Incidentally, it is often said that bigger voices are harder to record than smaller voices. That isn’t true. The problem is that recording engineers have a tin ear. They are not into tonality, but technology, electronics rather than acoustics. In addition, most conductors are musicians instead of singers, so they are just as tone deaf to the demands of vocal reproduction.
The way to record a big voice is put the singer in a fairly reverberant space, and position the microphone far enough away to catch the full resonance of the voice. This is why live recordings are often superior to studio recordings. In the usual studio recording, the voice is boxy, but the orchestra has a lot of depth because the conductor is less attuned to vocalism than instrumentalism. For him, the voice is just another instrument, to be woven into the whole.
A soprano with a pure head tone has a tinny, girlish or boyish sounding voice. German and English sopranos incline in this direction. Conversely, a woman with a raw chest voice makes a mannish, raucous sound.
What is true of female voices is true, to a lesser degree, of male voices. Pavarotti has a higher placement than Domingo. The production is sunny, resonant, and free, but not as rich as the baritonal lining on Domingo’s instrument, which can also take on heavier parts. Caruso, Domingo, and Melchior are all classic bottom-up voices.
This is also a matter of taste. For some listeners, the ideal tenor sound is a timbre which has no residual trace of baritonal coloring. It doesn’t range along the same continuum as the bass or the baritone. For this ear, a Gigli or Bjorling is optimal.
But for another pair of ears, too much head-tone makes the male voice take on a somewhat androgynous or effeminate quality. Lauri-Volpi used to say that Gigli sang like a girl! There is no doubt an element of professional rivalry in that barb. Nevertheless, which one would you rather have as your tail-gunner?
The Italian tenor is the star of the operatic constellation. He appeals to men and women alike, but for unlike reasons. Men see themselves in the role of the lover, while women see themselves in the role the belovéd. I also suspect that men are more likely to identify with a dramatic tenor, and women with a lyric tenor.
Moving further down the scale, Warren has a higher placement than Merrill. Indeed, some suspect that Warren was a lazy tenor, living in safety. This makes for wonderful clear and easy top notes, but the timbre is not as warm and round or well-centered when he comes down from the clouds.
Likewise, Ghiaurov has a higher placement than Talvela, Kipnis or Kurt Moll. This makes for spacious high notes with thin low notes, whereas the equation is rather the reverse in the case of Moll and Talvela. They have punchy high notes, but not the same amplitude. There’s a difference between a loud sound and a voluminous sound.
-ii-
There are exceptions to the above. Nilsson had a high heavy voice. This also raises the vexed question of the relation between tongue, technique, and vocal range. Was it a matter of her vocal endowment, vocal technique, Finnish language, or some combination thereof? Hard to say since she’s the only Finnish singer of her kind.
On a related note, many singers use the same technique in every role. This is especially the case for German and Italian singers, for they can make a career of singing exclusively in their national repertory.
Some singers vary their technique. I classified Milanov as a bottom-up soprano. But she also had a way of singing soft, high-lying phrases by detaching the head register, thereby allowing the downward weight of the chest register to drop out of sight, leaving a sustained pianissimo which seemed to be suspended in thin air.
Caballe is another singer famous for her pianissimi. Sutherland has said that she can do the same thing, but when she tries, it’s hard for her to get her full voice back. So this, again, illustrates the tradeoff between one method and another.
Corelli used just enough laryngeal manipulation to produce a very big, full sound, but he kept the larynx sufficiently free that, unlike del Monaco, who always sang with a low larynx, Corelli also had easy high notes and a lot of dynamic variation--even a high pianissimo.
-iii-
The two key components of vocal technique are placement and breathing. The right way to breathe is less a matter of what to do, than what not to do. Inhalation requires no muscular effort, for the vacuum left by exhalation is automatically replenished by the spontaneous equalization of the deflated lungs with external air pressure.
Certain postures and clothing styles which inhibit abdominal breathing as well as the natural expansion of the rib cage and chest cavity are to be avoided. On the other hand, a tense, rigid military posture should also be avoided. The classic hip-lock stance, with an easy upright posture, is conducive to deep breathing. Unless a man makes his living as a drag-queen, I would strongly advise him against wearing a corset!
Jerome Hines has made the unusual suggestion that a singer not take an extra breath before he begins to vocalize. According to Hines, we don’t take a breath before we speak, and singing emits less air than speaking. On his theory, you breathe deeply by not taking a deep breath. For when you spontaneously exhale, you automatically lower the diaphragm. Since Hines sang his last role at the tender age of 77, see if his technique works for you.
In some churches, you sit, rather than stand, to sing. But standing is better for support.
In some trendy, "seeker-sensitive" churches, there are no printed hymnals, the music being projected onto a screen. This forces the singer to cock his head, stretching the neck muscles and tensing the throat. Except for the occasional high note, you’ll never see an opera singer cock his head back.
Of course, the music as such a church is ordinarily so abysmal, consisting of lullabies and patter songs, that a real voice would embarrass and overwhelm the materials. In this situation, it is probably best to mimic the delivery of a superannuated pop star who talks his way through the number with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
-iv-
Singers are often criticized for their mushy diction. This takes two forms: slurring consonants and distorting vowels. Now, some singers take this to an unnecessary extreme. There is, however, a reason for this, and music critics or choir conductors who obsess over elocution misconceive the medium. It would profit the average "music minister" to become a vocal coach as well as a musician.
Now, although singing is an extension of speech, it is not the same thing as speech. The phonetics of speech are not adapted to vocalism. Just as an athlete will modify the way he moves or breathes, a singer will modify his speech patterns to produce, project, and sustain a singing tone. What works for John Gielgud won’t work for Joan Sutherland!
In particular, singers tend to broaden narrow vowels on high notes. For example, men will sing a long "e" as a short "i," or even shade it towards an "ay" sound, while women will sing a long "e" as an "ah."
Likewise, many singers will sacrifice distinct consonants for the sake of legato. There is more to this than bel canto. It is less of a strain on the vocal chords to sing legato than marcato.
Lieder singers make a virtue of necessity. Because they lack the vocal endowment to make it in grand opera, they work on idiomatic pronunciation and other expressive refinements. For their part, aging singers exaggerate the consonants to conceal their inability to sustain the vowels.
-v-
Some singers age better than others. This is partly a question of solid technique as well as resisting the temptation to sing parts that are too high or heavy for the voice.
Singers tend to learn their vocal technique by ear. It is not uncommon for young singers to rely on their natural endowment and direct auditory feedback. This can lead to a vocal crisis later on. By the time they learn how to consciously or properly produce their instrument, the baby-fat is off the voice.
A singer’s instrument is also more vulnerable to a personal or emotional or medical crisis than a pianist or violinist. The singer is his own medium. This can also precipitate a vocal crisis.
In a way, there is no such thing as vocal technique, in the sense of a uniform set of rules that can be instilled to yield reliable results. Many great singers become voice teachers when they retire, but very few of their students become great singers. So it’s not something that can be passed on.
Like any athletic endeavor, two men may have the same basic physical equipment, but one in more intuitively in touch with his body than the other. He has a better sense of balance. He can process the signals his body is sending him. Likewise, some great singers are less technically self-aware than others, which may be one reason they make poor teachers.
For some reason, most great singers are, to put it politely, overweight. Indeed, that’s often an understatement. You might think this would create problems for breathing and support, but it doesn’t seem to have that effect--not, at least, until the drag-factor of age begins to exact its revenge.
Yet it can be a problem when the libretto calls on the tenor to pick up the soprano and bear her away in his loving arms as the curtain falls. One soprano was said to be so obese that it took two separate trips to carry her off the stage!
To some extent, vocal preservation may be an illusion. The standard repertory rarely takes a soprano above high C. Yet a number of sopranos, at least in their prime, can singer higher than that, which leaves them with a margin to spare as gravity begins to transpose the range. Although they may lose a high note or two, the repertory still lies within their remaining range. In fact, for a time they may sound even better, for they can still hit the high notes, but the voice is fuller in their forties than it was in their twenties.
There is a popular notion that high voices age less well than low voices. But the recording medium doesn’t bear that out. It is true that the aging process is apt to reduce the upper extension, but this applies to low voices as well as high voices. Each category has a natural range. For a bass, a top F is the equivalent of a top C for a tenor or soprano. And it is not uncommon for the aging process to nibble away at both ends.
Top-down voices hang onto their high notes, but lose the middle voice and lower register while bottom-up voices keep--or even augment--the low-to-mid-range, but lose the high notes. Likewise, bottom-up voices are likely to remain firmer for longer, while top-down voices become unsteady in the middle voice, keeping the head voice intact, but coming apart at the break.
At the same time, the tenor or soprano line is more exposed for a high voice than a low voice. So any diminution is more conspicuous.
IX. Vocal writing
-i-
Some composers are better at writing for voice, others at absolute music. The short list of great vocal composers must number Handel, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Schubert--among others. The short list of great instrumental composers must number Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms--among others.
In my opinion, Bach is the greatest instrumental composer, and greatest composer in general, while Handel is the greatest vocal composer, and Mozart is the greatest operatic composer.
This is a difference of degree. One mark of a great composer is that he will excel in vocal and instrumental music alike. And although it’s quite possible to write fine vocal music without instrumentation, and fine instrumental music without vocalization, I would say that a cappella choral music has more to lose from the absence of instrumentalism than instrumental music from the absence of vocalization.
There is, indeed, a certain creative tension between a vocal and an instrumental bias. As I said before, playing a piano scoring of vocal music is a good test of vocal music qua music. I think it not incidental that Handel, Mozart, and Mendelssohn were all keyboard virtuosi. Schubert is something of an exception to the rule, but if you have enough raw talent you can write your own ticket.
Beethoven has a reputation for cruel vocal writing. Actually, Beethoven can write well for the voice when he wants to, but for Beethoven, the musical idea is ordinarily in the ascendant.
The same is true with respect to Bach. For Bach, the abstract structure is paramount. If you listen to the average Bach aria, it’s very beautiful, but if you separate out the vocal line from the accompaniment, the vocal line is often rather jerky and nondescript. The real beauty and distinction lies in the matchless accompaniment. That is what fires his imagination. Indeed, it is something of a misnomer to call it the "accompaniment."
For Handel, it’s rather the reverse. He has a natural feel for the human voice. But his purely instrumental writing is often less distinguished--almost workaday fare. For example, his overtures, written in the Italian style, are tasteful and eminently listenable, but not on the same plane as Corelli or Albinoni. You get a sense that Handel is going through the motions.
Handel wrote some very fine organ concerti, but that’s because he was a keyboard virtuoso, so that particular form engages his musical imagination in a way that orchestral writing does not. His concerti grossi are impressive because they’re meant to impress. Composers like to write in every form, just to prove that they can do it--not because they’re equally good in every form.
What gets Handel really fired up is a good libretto. He needs that to get his creative juices flowing. In this he differs from Bach and Schubert alike. Schubert could set a shopping list to music. So could Bach. But for Handel, dramatic imagination inspires musical imagination.
It’s not that the words are unimportant to Bach. But it’s more a case of bringing his musical art to bear on the text, rather than the text inspiring his musical art.
In rating their vocal music, I’d say that Handel composes greater vocal music qua "vocal" music, but Bach writes greater vocal music qua vocal "music." Bach approaches the task of vocal writing with an instrumental ear, but the supremacy of his musical genius makes for a greater overall effect.
-ii-
Is there an ideal vocal style? This question raises yet another question: does a composer adapt himself to the voice, or the voice to the composer?
Whatever the style, you can find some singers who are up to the demands of the music. Handel requires florid facility for all vocal ranges. Some modern-day singers have it, others not. In general, his music requires no great range or power--unless he’s writing for an exceptional singer like Montagnana.
Some Mozartian roles make great demands on the singer’s range. Again, some singers have the requisite range, others not. A few of his roles have demanding scale-work, but this is less common in Mozart than Handel or Vivaldi. And you don’t need a big voice to sing Mozart.
The vocal range of Wagner is somewhat beyond Handel, but not by much. Obviously, Wagner is not a fan of florid music. What his music requires is sheer vocal volume to compete with the orchestra. Melchior, Flagstad, and Nilsson are up to the demands of the lead roles. But that’s about it.
Russian choral music needs a bass that can drop down to low C or B flat, even the occasional F below low F.
Are composers writing for a preexisting voice, or can the human voice adapt to the demands of the new music? And does the native language condition the voice for a certain range or facility?
What would Handel have done with a Flagstad or Melchior? If Wagner didn’t exist, Flagstad would have to invent him!
In the past, a dramatic soprano would have sung mezzo or alto, and a Heldentenor the baritone roles.
Retired singers have a habit of treating the last generation--which is to say, their own generation, as the golden age, after which the vocal art went to pot. And there’s no doubt that in a post-Woodstock age, going to pot may aptly describe the lifestyle of some singers.
However, great singing seems to come and go in cycles. Melba’s scale-work was no better than Sutherland’s, while George Bernard Shaw says that Patti was better at legato than coloratura.
Sometimes a composer will write with a particular singer in mind--Handel for Montagnana, Mozart for Fischer and Constanze Weber. Billington could sing an A in alt, while Agujari could sing a C above high C.
Several things may account for this. Since baroque divas were competing with the castrati, it seems not unlikely that they may aspired to a more boyish, bell-like, flutelike timbre, rather than the big bosomy tone of a modern soprano. To judge by contemporary accounts, Catalani seems to have been the first dramatic soprano.
The castrato connection may be more specific. From Mustafa, one of the last of the castrati, Calvé picked up a vocal trick or "fourth voice," which was special sort of high voice, above the ordinary head voice.
Victorian divas were singing in a corset. You can’t sing from the diaphragm is that attire. It would be impossible to inhale and intone like Flagstad under such conditions. This may be one reason why the divas had a more girlish timbre back then.
Related to this, abdominal breathing expands the chest cavity. It isn’t merely that opera singers pile on the pounds over time. They also become broader across the beam.
In addition, women used to make their operatic debut in their teens, if not earlier. In this regard, Patti was especially precocious, making her debut at the tender age of seven! Nowadays, women make their debut in their twenties--and it often takes another ten years to achieve stardom. Obviously, the range and timbre of a teenager may be different from that of a grown woman, but if a woman began her career in the teens, she was apt to maintain the girlish timbre through--as you can hear in records of Melba and Patti.
Finally, improvements in diet have made modern men and women larger than their forebears. You can see this in old photographs.
George Bernard Shaw, under the spell of Wagner, bullied Jean De Reszke, the primo tenore of the day, into singing Siegfried and Tristan, soon after which De Reszke went into steep vocal decline. Ironically, Shaw later lost his infatuation with Wagner. But a music critic can outlive his critical misjudgments, whereas a vocalist cannot outlive his vocal misjudgments.
Yet all the blame cannot be laid at Wagner’s feet. If you compare the sound of a modern opera singer with old recordings of Victorian singers, it is clear that the 20C audience has developed an appetite for a bigger, fuller sound than was once the case, even in Wagner’s time, and there are singers willing and able to accommodate their taste.
Nowadays, a tenor lives and dies by his high C. But until the time of Duprez (1806-96), tenors resorted to the head register when taking their high notes. In Bellini’s I Puritani, the tenor line rises to F above high C. Duprez, an otherwise undistinguished tenor, changed all that when he make a career of taking the high C from the chest.
But the tenor voice paid a toll when it crossed that bridge. Verdi and Puccini write lower tenor parts than Rossini and Bellini. There are ever some early Verdi arias in the old tradition. In spite of that, precious few tenors have a good high C. There are men with a naturally high range, but they usually lack chest resonance; then there are men with the resonance, but they lack the reach. They are really high baritones. It is rare to find a man who can place the voice high, with real chest resonance, and still sound at ease. Among postwar tenors, Corelli and Pavarotti are the most successful. Domingo is very fine, but there are times when you suspect that he’s a pushed-up baritone (same with Caruso and Melchior), while Leonard Warren sounds like a Heldentenor on a holiday.
This is also a question of technique. Caruso and Melchior sang with a low larynx, which makes it possible to carry the chest register quite high. But the effect is somewhat effortful.
Frankly, there’s no way to make the modern tenor sound entirely natural. It is the most artificial vocal category. For the opera buff, some of its appeal lies in this high-wire act. Will the tenor crack on the high C or burst a blood vessel in the process? For my taste, the tenor voice is a bit too overbred to be quite manly. When you take the wolf out of the dog, you end up with one of those nippy yippy lap-dogs.
The Verdi baritone must have a solid high G, as well as the odd A flat and A natural. But it retains a drop of wolf blood in its veins, which is why I prefer the growling sound of a high baritone to the yippity-yap-yap of the tenor.
-iii-
What are we to make of all this? In terms of ideal vocal writing, it is probably best to compose music which a good voice with good technique can sing, rather than write music which only a freak of nature can sing.
And even when you can find a freak-mutant to fill the role, the overall effect may still be less than entirely pleasing. Extremely high voices tend to sound rather adolescent, while extremely big voices are so godlike that they lose the human touch. This is why many connoisseurs prefer Frida Leider to Flagstad, or Crespin to Nilsson, in the big Wagnerian roles.
One reason Joan Sutherland was so popular and so exceptional is that she could combine the acuti with a very warm and womanly middle voice. Indeed, that was part of her technique--a plump middle voice which she carried all the way up to a high B natural, before flipping into the head register for the acuti.
At the same time, we can take a cue from the ad libitum character of Baroque music. If a singer happens to have an exceptional high range or low range or trill or whatever, let the singer embellish or interpolate where appropriate.
It would be best if a tenor not sing any higher than he can comfortably sing in the chest register. For purposes of choral music, say, the composer shouldn’t say the tenor line above the range of a Verdi baritone.
For purposes of hymn writing, the average untrained voice has little more that an octave of usable range--say, between a lower C and an upper D. Occasional excursions above and below this are okay, but the tessitura should stay within this general range.
It would free things up if more congregations could do part-singing. Learning to sight-sing would benefit untrained voices, since unison singing means that everyone must tackle the treble line.
Many hymnals are pitched too high. But in the age of the digital organ, it hymn can be transposed at the flip of a switch.
Choral singing can be rather more ambitious, but less so than operatic writing. The average choir is always underrepresented in the tenor section. Most amateur sopranos can’t ascend above the staff with ease, although you often have a natural high soprano or two. It’s probably best to have an alternate line or optional descant for high sopranos. The bass part tends to run a tad high for a true bass and a tad low for a true baritone. It also depends on whether we’re talking about a church choir or professional choir.
It’s an oddity of traditional choral writing that that the range of the alto part is so narrow while the range of the bass part is so wide. As a rule, an alto has a naturally longer voice than a bass, because she can sing in both registers. Choral writing ought to reflect that.
The reason it doesn’t is, I suppose, because a number of the great composers took the keyboard (organ, piano, harpsichord) as their primary instrument. They compose a chorus the way they’d write for the keyboard, where the outer voices frame the music. The soprano line reprises the right-hand, supplying the melody--while the bass line reprises the left-hand, supplying the harmony. The inner voices (alto, tenor) are the musical scavengers, gobbling up the leftover notes.
Certainly keyboard technique has a lingering impact on compositional style. The orchestral "repeat" is a throwback to the two-manual (loud/soft) harpsichord.
To some extent, this also has a prehistory in antiphonal singing, with opposing double-choruses--such as you see at San Marco. And that format goes all the way back to the Psalter.
Music: sacred & profane-2
-vi-
For the most part, music is an aristocracy, but there are some exceptions to the rule: Anything with a German name carries a certain prestige. This is true is many fields besides music. An American name lacks the same caché.
By the same token, chauvinism promotes certain composers out of due proportion to their intrinsic worth--merely as a matter of national pride. A mediocre composer on the international stage may enjoy a national following because he has no domestic competitors, or because the indigenous standard is so uniformly low that what’s bad is good.
Ironically, some mediocre composers make it into the standard repertory as an act of diplomatic deference--in the musical equivalent of the UN--where every native son, however ne'er-do-well, has a seat at the table.
Some mediocre composers figure in the standard repertory because their music is a war-horse or virtuoso vehicle for a diva or big-ticket pianist or violinist.
Likewise, some mediocre composers make the cut in a musical subdivision like opera. It may not be great music, but all it needs is the sponsorship of a particular constituency or special-interest group.
Similarly, mediocre composers figure in the standard repertory of a particular instrument, because the solo repertory is so limited for that particular instrument.
Finally, some mediocre music gets performed because it's oh-so avant-. No one may play it a generation from now when it takes is place beside yesterday’s newspaper, but for the time being it’s the toast of the town.
-vii-
There is a perennial battle--especially in opera--between the Dionysians and the Apollonians. The Apollonians are the voice-lovers, while the Dionysians champion the singing-actor. Dionysians attack singers golden-throated singers who are fat, can’t act, and sacrifice diction for euphony.
It’s funny to read music reviewers who solemnly inform the reader that the younger generation will no longer put up with overweight singers. Raised on TV and film, young operagoers are going to demand opera singers with a credible physique.
Of course, this rather elitist prediction makes the assumption that fat people can’t fall in love--or that fat operagoers can’t identify with fat opera singers. And year after year, voice-lovers continue to patronize the opera singers with the best set of vocal cords. What is more, this comes in a roly-poly package. There is the rare singer who is pleasing to eye and ear alike. But that’s a bonus point. As long as you’ve got the vocal equipment, you can look like you’re auditioning for the circus and still have a very lucrative career on the opera stage.
The Dionysian complaint suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. It is the job of the composer, not the singer, to capture the mood and the meaning of the text. When setting words to music, a composer’s duty is to translate dramatic values into musical values. And, by that same token, the singer’s duty is to sing well. If the composer has done his job, then the singer will be true to the text by being true to the vocal line, respecting the dynamic markings, and so forth. The drama lies in the music and musicianship.
This is not to deny that a naturally expressive or verbally alert singer can enhance the dramatic effect. No doubt divas like Sutherland, Caballe, and Milanov are fairly faceless--like musical mannequins. To turn from one of them to a recording of Regine Crespin in her prime is like going from a disembodied voice to a woman in the flesh. And if you can get all this in one juicy package, which is very rare, then so much the better. But it is unfair to the singer and uncomprehending of the art form to constantly berate singers who do full justice to the music while always praising singers whose acting, however compelling, is in spite of and at the expense of musical values.
-viii-
Some Christians disapprove of choirs and soloists because they think it’s prideful and egotistical to stick out. The focus has shifted from God to man.
There is, of course, a grain of truth to this. Some folks are wittier and prettier. They have star-power.
This is unavoidable. It is never truer than in the pulpit. But you might as well say that a beautiful woman should go around with a sack over her head. Come to think if it, there’s a religious tradition--Islam--which says that very thing.
But in Paul’s master metaphor, the church is a body with many members. The solution is not to level everyone down to the same lowly member, but to honor every member for its distinct contribution to the whole, and to deploy each member according to its particular gift.
IV. Semiotics
Although music is an abstract artistic medium, it has a marvelous mimetic and synesthetic potential in simulating and stimulating moods, hues, and visual cues. This operates at many levels.
Rhythmic intervals reflect time while pitch intervals simulate space. Sound is folded space.
A major key naturally conveys an upbeat mood, and a minor key a downbeat mood. Notice how "upbeat" and "downbeat" are, of themselves, musical metaphors.
A rising cadence conveys as comic mood--in the classical sense of comedy--whereas a falling cadence conveys a triste or tragic mood.
The very fact that we think of music as high and low, rising and falling, represents a synesthetic carryover of a naturally visual cue. The musical analogue is a case of second-order synesthesia.
Fast music conveys agitation or exhilaration, while slow music conveys a sad or meditative mood.
The contrast between staccato and legato can have the same effect.
We lavish a variety of visual and tactile metaphors on timbre, describing a certain sound as bright and dark, warm and cold, creamy, silvery, velvety, abrasive, and so on. For some striking comparisons, cf. N. Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian aesthetic (Eerdmans, 1980), 96ff.
What accounts for this cross-categorial affinity? And why we invest certain sensory properties and spatial relations with such moral and emotional significance?
This is because the material order is a moral order. God has made the sensible world to be a simile of the spiritual world. God has encoded these associations in the human mind--associations which are triggered when the mind comes into contact with a suitable stimulus. Herein line the power of painting and poetry as well as music.
V. Genre
-i-
Is there such a thing as a sacred style of music? To some ears, certain types of sacred music sound profane. Voltaire described Haydn and Mozart church music as opera for the masses. One can only imagine what epithets he would have reserved for the sacred music of Rossini, Berlioz and Bizet.
Conversely, certain types of profane music sound sacred, viz., "Ombra mai fu," Gluck’s dance of the blessed spirits, &c.).
In terms of musical style, there is no sacred genre, per se. And to some extent, what strikes a listener as reverent or irreverent has a lot to do with the music’s cultural associations. Contemporary music has the strongest cultural associations because it is something we directly experience in conjunction with the current state of the general culture. As music drops outside the lifetime of the listener, it tends to lose whatever odious associations it may otherwise have.
One reviewer criticized a hymnal because one of the hymn tunes was taken from Brahms’ first symphony. I find this objection decidedly odd.
It is one thing to disapprove of a hymn-tune because it triggers unsuitable textual associations. There was, for example, a time when you could hear a "sacred" setting of the Drinking Song from Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia when you went to Mass.
But most orchestral (or chamber) music has no textual referent. So what if we associate a hymn-tune with a symphony? If we don’t find the symphony offensive, why do we find the hymn-tune offensive?
To me, the more important distinction is between good music and bad music. If a hymnodist can plunder the Egyptians, in Augustine’s apt phrase, so much the better.
Finally, if a singer is astute enough to associate a hymn-tune with a Brahms' symphony, he is astute enough to discount this adventitious association. Sophistication is a two-way street. It can disallow or make allowance--whichever is better.
-ii-
The distinction between old music and new music is deeply misleading. Music has a date, but music isn’t dated in the same sense that Jane Austen or Thomas Gainsborough is dated. That is because music is an abstract medium in a way that portrait painting or a novel of manners, with its concrete setting, is not. Music is a product of a particular period and place, but it is not a period piece in the same sense as many other art forms.
Its time of composition doesn’t come stamped upon it, and if you didn’t know the history of music, you couldn’t tell to what century a given piece of music belongs. To someone whose musical ideal is the George Beverly Shea repertory, an Ira Sankey hymn sounds up-to-date while a carol by John Rutter sounds old-fashioned--even though Sankey is long dead while Rutter is very much alive.
A partial exception to the law of diminishing invidious returns is opera music. If a listener is an opera buff, he is likely to recognize an opera tune, and, what is more, it will conjure up all the dramatic associations as well. This is especially the case with 19C opera, which still forms the backbone of the repertory.
-iii-
There is, however, a more intrinsic sense in which some music is more reverent than other music. And that lies in music’s mimetic capacity to simulate and evoke certain moods. Indeed, the emotional appeal of music is what makes music such an appealing art form to so many men and women.
And some moods are more appropriate to worship than others. Of course, a good worship service varies the mood. So the intuitive view of a sacred style, however, inchoate, has more than a grain of truth.
VI. Gender
-i-
Nothing is more stereotypical than opera. Sopranos and tenors play young lovers, baritones play the stalwart friend of the hero, mezzos play bad girls, while bassos and altos play mom and pop or other authority figures, whether benevolent or malevolent.
More often than not, the stereotype precipitates a comic clash between sight as sound as a chunky-built, overripe soprano plays an ingénue while a chunky-built, overripe tenor plays the fresh-faced suitor.
Is this just a convention, or does the stereotype run deeper than that? That’s is an important question because it goes, in part, to why we find beauty so elusive of definition, of why we find certain sights and sounds agreeable, and others disagreeable.
On the face of it, there’s no logical reason why opera should even exist. Why are there folks who find the vocal medium so compelling? Why can they get into heated debates over the relative merits of Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland? Why do they put up with these ridiculously overwrought plots in which everyone is dead by the last act?
No doubt there’s a heavy element of decadence in all this. But it has a basis in natural revelation and common grace.
The world is at once a natural order and a moral order. At one level, the natural order is a metaphor for the moral order. The reason we associate certain vocal ranges with certain role-relations, the reason we, or--at least, some of us--find a particular timbre pleasing, is that God has encoded natural law into certain sights and sounds. We are preprogrammed to register, at a subliminal level, a moral norm or abstract universal in a concrete particular.
Various vocal categories symbolize and simulate various social roles and relations--a masculine ideal, a feminine ideal, the friend, the lover, the father, the mother, the hero, the heroine, the priest, prophet, king, or villain.
At a literal level, the only difference between Joan Sutherland and Florence Foster Jenkins is a different set of overtones. At that level, there’s no reason why we attach so much emotional significance to one sound wave over another.
From a biological perspective, the primary purpose of the larynx in not to generate a high C, but to regulate food and oxygen intake. Nothing especially romantic about that. On the face of it, singing is a rather freakish secondary adaptation of muscle designed to do something else.
And yet, from a theological standpoint, that explanation is unduly reductionistic. For one thing, the idea of dual-use technology in the engineering of the human body is not an alien concept. An obvious example is the way in which the same organs perform sexual and excretory functions.
We know that man was graced with the gift of speech (Gen 2), so that application of the larynx is a primary, and not a secondary application.
Singing is an extension of speech, and song is a Biblical means and mandate of worship. That does not, of itself, prescribe a particular technique, but it does suggest that the capacity of the larynx to sing as well as speak is written into the original design of the organ. Among other things, the larynx is meant to be used as a musical instrument.
To approach this from another angle, the many references to the turtledove in Canticles (1:15; 2:12,14; 4:1; 5:2,12; 6:9) is such a romantic cliché that we may not give it a second thought. We associate songbirds with spring, and spring with the season of love. Nothing is more trite than calling a smitten couple a pair of lovebirds--wooing and cooing in each other’s company. Yes, that’s the stuff of love poetry the world round.
But this is more than a cliché, this is a Biblical cliché. It is important to know which cultural clichés enjoy divine warrant.
-ii-
The question of gender also raises the question of gender-specific music. For some, the sexless style of Palestrina and Tudor music, with their prepubescent boys and foppish countertenors, sheered of any orchestral accompaniment or rhythmic vitality, represents the ideal. Anything else is irreverent.
This sort of music exemplifies the popular preconception of angelic song. Indeed, the voice of a boy soprano is typically described as "angelic."
Now, I have no problem with boy choirs or girl choirs. A lot of parents also thing it’s cute when kids sing out of tune. But there’s no reason why boys and girls can’t be taught to sing properly.
There is, however, no good reason why we should be writing music for the angels. We may have an immortal, incorporeal soul, but we are also creatures of flesh-and-blood, differentiated by sex and sexual maturation.
The Bible condemns any gender-bending ethic. But pop vocalism has an insidious way of reversing the roles. Women belt out their numbers in a raw, mannish chest voice while men croon like drag queens. Gender-blending isn’t limited to pop vocalism. Countertenors are literally effeminate.
Conversely, the Italian tradition fosters a compartmentalized piety, in which we have sexless church music and oversexed opera music. Some opera buffs even find their religious inspiration on the operatic stage. Rudolf Bing attributed Renata Tebaldi’s cult-like fandome to the confluence of Marian iconography with Tebaldi’s stage persona.
We need to strike a balance. There ought to be no sacred/profane dichotomy, but rather, a style suitable to both. There is nothing wrong with a degree of muted sensuality in church--a sensuality that doesn’t flaunt itself, but is simply a God-given and God-honoring expression of our natural manhood or womanhood. We ought to foster a closer connection between Christian anthropology and Christian axiology. Men should sound like men, and women like women. It’s a judgment on the church when the opera house often does a better job of modeling manhood and womanhood than the sanctuary.
-iii-
Opera presents a corrupt version of the chivalric code. One reason for the development of opera is that it deals with subject-matter disallowed in traditional church music. Indeed, we have here something of a vicious cycle. Opera music is so profane because it is not an outgrowth of a Christian outlook on life. Opera is essentially a product of Catholic culture. And in Catholicism you have a dichotomy between the religious orders and the laity. The subject-matter of Catholic church music is the Mass and the cult of the saints.
What this leaves entirely out of view is normal family life--of men and women who come of age, fall in love, marry, and raise of family--who work inside or outside the home to support a family--as well as many other aspects of ordinary life, such as friendship, sports, war, adventure, exploration, the natural world, the life-cycle, &c.
These are things which the rank-and-file are going to think about, write about, sing about, and act on with or without religious guidance. By failing to integrate that larger slice of life into Christian music, it cannot be consecrated and sanctified to the glory of God.
One of the legacies of the Protestant Reformation was the notion that every Christian has a divine vocation, that the layman has a Christian calling to serve God.
This, however, did not work its way into Christian music because Lutheran music is cross-centered, while Reformed music is Psalm-centered. Bach set the Mass to music. He replaced the cult of the saints with the Passion of Christ. And he wrote a few secular cantatas, as well as many sacred cantatas. For his part, Handel set OT narrative to music--along with many Italian operas, as well as a few in English--while Mendelssohn set NT narrative to music.
Much of this marks an advance over the subject-matter of Catholic church music. There is an important place for this. But, for the most part, it still leaves the laity on the outside, looking in.
You can see the same divided piety at work in "gospel" music and the crossover artist. A gospel-singer who "crosses over" is stigmatized for cashing in on a lucrative market. And there is usually an element of moral and spiritual compromise at work here. In that respect, a crossover artist deserves to be ostracized.
Yet the standard fare of gospel music, which is all about getting saved and getting to heaven, but not much in-between, presents a severely truncated view of the Christian lifestyle. There’s more to the walk of faith than a conversion experience followed by a funeral.
It ought to be possible for a believer to sing about falling in love and staying in love without having to check his faith at the doorstep.
VII. Vox et verbum.
-i-
Every language or dialect has a distinctive timbre which tends, in turn, to cultivate a certain vocal placement.
Spoken French is beautiful, but sung French is very tricky, for sustaining the nasals produces a nasal twang, which is not at all bel canto--reminding one of Rudolf Bing’s quip that if the Met had a bad night, the Paris Opera had a bad century.
German is better for low voices than high voices. Among the great Wagnerians, Melchior was Danish, Nilsson Finnish, and Flagstad Norwegian. But Germany has produced some fine altos, baritones, and bassos.
Russian is also better for low voices than high voices--especially the basso, although Russian opera doesn’t make the same demands on the low range as the choral repertory. The women, by contrast, are often squally in the high range.
English depends on the dialect. The Oxbridge accent, however elegant for the spoken word, is fatal for the sung word.
However, other English accents seem to fare better: Forrester and Vickers are Canadians, Melba and Sutherland Aussies, Te Kanawa a New Zealander.
French, German, and English women normally have a fairly clear division between the head and chest registers. Is this an effect of language, or a result of their ecclesiastical choral tradition, with men and boys co-opting the soprano/alto line? It doesn’t have that effect on Italians, who share the same ecclesiastical tradition.
Speaking of boy sopranos, the sound which we’re accustomed to hearing today--involving a cool, pure, and straight-edged head-tone is not necessarily how the treble used to sound in times past. If you listen to Earnest Lough’s recordings from the 20s, he has a mixed tone with a natural vibrato. Although the timbre is unmistakably male, the production is more characteristic of grown woman. This may be because boys' voices broke at a later age back then--around the upper teens.
The Welsh language also turns out some fine singers (Burrows, Howell, Terfel, Price).
Black-Americans often have deep, resonant speaking voices, although they incline to a nasal or chesty production, with a rough transition over the break. You can hear this in Norman and Price when they sing around the break. Blacks have yet to produce a great operatic bass, although some black men clearly have the raw equipment. But their musical tradition selects for pop vocalism instead of classical vocalism.
The typical white American accent tends to be somewhat pinched and nasal. This works well enough for country-western, but not for classical vocalism. It has the same aesthetic appeal as Japanese opera--where you sing through the nose instead of the mouth.
Latin and Italian are best, although the placement can be a bit too forward or bottom-heavy. Spanish singers can easily pass in the Italian repertory, although Caballe, for one, has to guard against a nasal attack.
-ii-
There are partial exceptions to the rule. Crespin sang French that was both beautiful and idiomatic, but that’s because she was Italian on her mother’s side, which had a moderating influence on the placement--with its pure, open vowels and bounded phrasing.
Frida Leider was an outstanding German soprano. As a dramatic soprano, she can to cultivate the chest register, which, in turn, filled out the head-tone. She also mastered the Italian repertory, which had a further softening effect on the Teutonic vocal production--melting the Alpine frost with a shaft of southern sunshine.
VIII. Vocal technique.
-i-
The human voice naturally divides into two registers, head and chest. This is equally true of men and women, children and adults.
In men, the chest register is dominant--in women, the head. Low female voices tend to be chestier, and high men’s voices tend to be headier.
In classical vocal technique, a man sings entirely from the chest--unless he’s a dandified countertenor, whereas a woman tries to bridge the two registers by cultivating a middle voice, which is a mixed tone. If you want to hear a seamless female voice, listen to Flagstad
Because women sing in both registers, they naturally have a longer voice (wider range) than men. A male vocalist has about two usable octaves--two-and-a-half if he’s exceptional, whereas a female vocalist has about two-and-a-half usable octaves--three if she’s exceptional.
The vocal apparatus must make certain muscular adjustments in going from low to high or vice versa. In terms of vocal technique, you can build a voice from the bottom up or the top down. To some extent this corresponds with the natural range of the voice. It is more natural for a lower, heavier voice to build from the bottom-up, and a higher, lighter voice to build from the top-down.
Each technique carries a trade-off. As Jerome Hines put it, every solution has its problems. You trade high notes for low notes, a higher center of gravity for a lower center of gravity.
Take some sopranos. Flagstad, Tebaldi, Milanov, and Ponselle represent the bottom-up approach. This makes for a fulsome low and middle range, with a columnar tone and even emission of sound. These were all dramatic sopranos, with the same basic range as mezzo-sopranos.
Put another way, their voices have more chest resonance mixed into the middle voice. To some ears, this is the most beautiful type of timbre.
But there’s a price to be paid. It generally works better in slow music than fast music. And the effect is to tug the voice down, making high notes an audible effort. Also, big deep voices have a matronly, even matriarchal, tone which limits their sex appeal when they aspire to sing the virginal heroine.
By contrast, Sutherland, Caballe, and Leontyne Price represent the top-down approach. This makes for a vibrant, floating tone, with easy, ringing high notes and a round, ebullient middle range. They are basically corn-fed lyric sopranos.
Put another way, their voices have more head resonance mixed into the middle voice. To some ears, this pitches the voice at a more natural altitude, resulting in a more youthful tone and authentic soprano sound. True songbirds, they can live up there in a way a heavier voice cannot. They make their home in the branches, while their earthbound sisters live closer to the ground. A word like "warbler" comes naturally to Sutherland in a way it doesn’t to Flagstad. Flagstad is swan gliding on a pond, but La Stupenda is a nightingale in the treetops.
For the most part, music is an aristocracy, but there are some exceptions to the rule: Anything with a German name carries a certain prestige. This is true is many fields besides music. An American name lacks the same caché.
By the same token, chauvinism promotes certain composers out of due proportion to their intrinsic worth--merely as a matter of national pride. A mediocre composer on the international stage may enjoy a national following because he has no domestic competitors, or because the indigenous standard is so uniformly low that what’s bad is good.
Ironically, some mediocre composers make it into the standard repertory as an act of diplomatic deference--in the musical equivalent of the UN--where every native son, however ne'er-do-well, has a seat at the table.
Some mediocre composers figure in the standard repertory because their music is a war-horse or virtuoso vehicle for a diva or big-ticket pianist or violinist.
Likewise, some mediocre composers make the cut in a musical subdivision like opera. It may not be great music, but all it needs is the sponsorship of a particular constituency or special-interest group.
Similarly, mediocre composers figure in the standard repertory of a particular instrument, because the solo repertory is so limited for that particular instrument.
Finally, some mediocre music gets performed because it's oh-so avant-. No one may play it a generation from now when it takes is place beside yesterday’s newspaper, but for the time being it’s the toast of the town.
-vii-
There is a perennial battle--especially in opera--between the Dionysians and the Apollonians. The Apollonians are the voice-lovers, while the Dionysians champion the singing-actor. Dionysians attack singers golden-throated singers who are fat, can’t act, and sacrifice diction for euphony.
It’s funny to read music reviewers who solemnly inform the reader that the younger generation will no longer put up with overweight singers. Raised on TV and film, young operagoers are going to demand opera singers with a credible physique.
Of course, this rather elitist prediction makes the assumption that fat people can’t fall in love--or that fat operagoers can’t identify with fat opera singers. And year after year, voice-lovers continue to patronize the opera singers with the best set of vocal cords. What is more, this comes in a roly-poly package. There is the rare singer who is pleasing to eye and ear alike. But that’s a bonus point. As long as you’ve got the vocal equipment, you can look like you’re auditioning for the circus and still have a very lucrative career on the opera stage.
The Dionysian complaint suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. It is the job of the composer, not the singer, to capture the mood and the meaning of the text. When setting words to music, a composer’s duty is to translate dramatic values into musical values. And, by that same token, the singer’s duty is to sing well. If the composer has done his job, then the singer will be true to the text by being true to the vocal line, respecting the dynamic markings, and so forth. The drama lies in the music and musicianship.
This is not to deny that a naturally expressive or verbally alert singer can enhance the dramatic effect. No doubt divas like Sutherland, Caballe, and Milanov are fairly faceless--like musical mannequins. To turn from one of them to a recording of Regine Crespin in her prime is like going from a disembodied voice to a woman in the flesh. And if you can get all this in one juicy package, which is very rare, then so much the better. But it is unfair to the singer and uncomprehending of the art form to constantly berate singers who do full justice to the music while always praising singers whose acting, however compelling, is in spite of and at the expense of musical values.
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Some Christians disapprove of choirs and soloists because they think it’s prideful and egotistical to stick out. The focus has shifted from God to man.
There is, of course, a grain of truth to this. Some folks are wittier and prettier. They have star-power.
This is unavoidable. It is never truer than in the pulpit. But you might as well say that a beautiful woman should go around with a sack over her head. Come to think if it, there’s a religious tradition--Islam--which says that very thing.
But in Paul’s master metaphor, the church is a body with many members. The solution is not to level everyone down to the same lowly member, but to honor every member for its distinct contribution to the whole, and to deploy each member according to its particular gift.
IV. Semiotics
Although music is an abstract artistic medium, it has a marvelous mimetic and synesthetic potential in simulating and stimulating moods, hues, and visual cues. This operates at many levels.
Rhythmic intervals reflect time while pitch intervals simulate space. Sound is folded space.
A major key naturally conveys an upbeat mood, and a minor key a downbeat mood. Notice how "upbeat" and "downbeat" are, of themselves, musical metaphors.
A rising cadence conveys as comic mood--in the classical sense of comedy--whereas a falling cadence conveys a triste or tragic mood.
The very fact that we think of music as high and low, rising and falling, represents a synesthetic carryover of a naturally visual cue. The musical analogue is a case of second-order synesthesia.
Fast music conveys agitation or exhilaration, while slow music conveys a sad or meditative mood.
The contrast between staccato and legato can have the same effect.
We lavish a variety of visual and tactile metaphors on timbre, describing a certain sound as bright and dark, warm and cold, creamy, silvery, velvety, abrasive, and so on. For some striking comparisons, cf. N. Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian aesthetic (Eerdmans, 1980), 96ff.
What accounts for this cross-categorial affinity? And why we invest certain sensory properties and spatial relations with such moral and emotional significance?
This is because the material order is a moral order. God has made the sensible world to be a simile of the spiritual world. God has encoded these associations in the human mind--associations which are triggered when the mind comes into contact with a suitable stimulus. Herein line the power of painting and poetry as well as music.
V. Genre
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Is there such a thing as a sacred style of music? To some ears, certain types of sacred music sound profane. Voltaire described Haydn and Mozart church music as opera for the masses. One can only imagine what epithets he would have reserved for the sacred music of Rossini, Berlioz and Bizet.
Conversely, certain types of profane music sound sacred, viz., "Ombra mai fu," Gluck’s dance of the blessed spirits, &c.).
In terms of musical style, there is no sacred genre, per se. And to some extent, what strikes a listener as reverent or irreverent has a lot to do with the music’s cultural associations. Contemporary music has the strongest cultural associations because it is something we directly experience in conjunction with the current state of the general culture. As music drops outside the lifetime of the listener, it tends to lose whatever odious associations it may otherwise have.
One reviewer criticized a hymnal because one of the hymn tunes was taken from Brahms’ first symphony. I find this objection decidedly odd.
It is one thing to disapprove of a hymn-tune because it triggers unsuitable textual associations. There was, for example, a time when you could hear a "sacred" setting of the Drinking Song from Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia when you went to Mass.
But most orchestral (or chamber) music has no textual referent. So what if we associate a hymn-tune with a symphony? If we don’t find the symphony offensive, why do we find the hymn-tune offensive?
To me, the more important distinction is between good music and bad music. If a hymnodist can plunder the Egyptians, in Augustine’s apt phrase, so much the better.
Finally, if a singer is astute enough to associate a hymn-tune with a Brahms' symphony, he is astute enough to discount this adventitious association. Sophistication is a two-way street. It can disallow or make allowance--whichever is better.
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The distinction between old music and new music is deeply misleading. Music has a date, but music isn’t dated in the same sense that Jane Austen or Thomas Gainsborough is dated. That is because music is an abstract medium in a way that portrait painting or a novel of manners, with its concrete setting, is not. Music is a product of a particular period and place, but it is not a period piece in the same sense as many other art forms.
Its time of composition doesn’t come stamped upon it, and if you didn’t know the history of music, you couldn’t tell to what century a given piece of music belongs. To someone whose musical ideal is the George Beverly Shea repertory, an Ira Sankey hymn sounds up-to-date while a carol by John Rutter sounds old-fashioned--even though Sankey is long dead while Rutter is very much alive.
A partial exception to the law of diminishing invidious returns is opera music. If a listener is an opera buff, he is likely to recognize an opera tune, and, what is more, it will conjure up all the dramatic associations as well. This is especially the case with 19C opera, which still forms the backbone of the repertory.
-iii-
There is, however, a more intrinsic sense in which some music is more reverent than other music. And that lies in music’s mimetic capacity to simulate and evoke certain moods. Indeed, the emotional appeal of music is what makes music such an appealing art form to so many men and women.
And some moods are more appropriate to worship than others. Of course, a good worship service varies the mood. So the intuitive view of a sacred style, however, inchoate, has more than a grain of truth.
VI. Gender
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Nothing is more stereotypical than opera. Sopranos and tenors play young lovers, baritones play the stalwart friend of the hero, mezzos play bad girls, while bassos and altos play mom and pop or other authority figures, whether benevolent or malevolent.
More often than not, the stereotype precipitates a comic clash between sight as sound as a chunky-built, overripe soprano plays an ingénue while a chunky-built, overripe tenor plays the fresh-faced suitor.
Is this just a convention, or does the stereotype run deeper than that? That’s is an important question because it goes, in part, to why we find beauty so elusive of definition, of why we find certain sights and sounds agreeable, and others disagreeable.
On the face of it, there’s no logical reason why opera should even exist. Why are there folks who find the vocal medium so compelling? Why can they get into heated debates over the relative merits of Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland? Why do they put up with these ridiculously overwrought plots in which everyone is dead by the last act?
No doubt there’s a heavy element of decadence in all this. But it has a basis in natural revelation and common grace.
The world is at once a natural order and a moral order. At one level, the natural order is a metaphor for the moral order. The reason we associate certain vocal ranges with certain role-relations, the reason we, or--at least, some of us--find a particular timbre pleasing, is that God has encoded natural law into certain sights and sounds. We are preprogrammed to register, at a subliminal level, a moral norm or abstract universal in a concrete particular.
Various vocal categories symbolize and simulate various social roles and relations--a masculine ideal, a feminine ideal, the friend, the lover, the father, the mother, the hero, the heroine, the priest, prophet, king, or villain.
At a literal level, the only difference between Joan Sutherland and Florence Foster Jenkins is a different set of overtones. At that level, there’s no reason why we attach so much emotional significance to one sound wave over another.
From a biological perspective, the primary purpose of the larynx in not to generate a high C, but to regulate food and oxygen intake. Nothing especially romantic about that. On the face of it, singing is a rather freakish secondary adaptation of muscle designed to do something else.
And yet, from a theological standpoint, that explanation is unduly reductionistic. For one thing, the idea of dual-use technology in the engineering of the human body is not an alien concept. An obvious example is the way in which the same organs perform sexual and excretory functions.
We know that man was graced with the gift of speech (Gen 2), so that application of the larynx is a primary, and not a secondary application.
Singing is an extension of speech, and song is a Biblical means and mandate of worship. That does not, of itself, prescribe a particular technique, but it does suggest that the capacity of the larynx to sing as well as speak is written into the original design of the organ. Among other things, the larynx is meant to be used as a musical instrument.
To approach this from another angle, the many references to the turtledove in Canticles (1:15; 2:12,14; 4:1; 5:2,12; 6:9) is such a romantic cliché that we may not give it a second thought. We associate songbirds with spring, and spring with the season of love. Nothing is more trite than calling a smitten couple a pair of lovebirds--wooing and cooing in each other’s company. Yes, that’s the stuff of love poetry the world round.
But this is more than a cliché, this is a Biblical cliché. It is important to know which cultural clichés enjoy divine warrant.
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The question of gender also raises the question of gender-specific music. For some, the sexless style of Palestrina and Tudor music, with their prepubescent boys and foppish countertenors, sheered of any orchestral accompaniment or rhythmic vitality, represents the ideal. Anything else is irreverent.
This sort of music exemplifies the popular preconception of angelic song. Indeed, the voice of a boy soprano is typically described as "angelic."
Now, I have no problem with boy choirs or girl choirs. A lot of parents also thing it’s cute when kids sing out of tune. But there’s no reason why boys and girls can’t be taught to sing properly.
There is, however, no good reason why we should be writing music for the angels. We may have an immortal, incorporeal soul, but we are also creatures of flesh-and-blood, differentiated by sex and sexual maturation.
The Bible condemns any gender-bending ethic. But pop vocalism has an insidious way of reversing the roles. Women belt out their numbers in a raw, mannish chest voice while men croon like drag queens. Gender-blending isn’t limited to pop vocalism. Countertenors are literally effeminate.
Conversely, the Italian tradition fosters a compartmentalized piety, in which we have sexless church music and oversexed opera music. Some opera buffs even find their religious inspiration on the operatic stage. Rudolf Bing attributed Renata Tebaldi’s cult-like fandome to the confluence of Marian iconography with Tebaldi’s stage persona.
We need to strike a balance. There ought to be no sacred/profane dichotomy, but rather, a style suitable to both. There is nothing wrong with a degree of muted sensuality in church--a sensuality that doesn’t flaunt itself, but is simply a God-given and God-honoring expression of our natural manhood or womanhood. We ought to foster a closer connection between Christian anthropology and Christian axiology. Men should sound like men, and women like women. It’s a judgment on the church when the opera house often does a better job of modeling manhood and womanhood than the sanctuary.
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Opera presents a corrupt version of the chivalric code. One reason for the development of opera is that it deals with subject-matter disallowed in traditional church music. Indeed, we have here something of a vicious cycle. Opera music is so profane because it is not an outgrowth of a Christian outlook on life. Opera is essentially a product of Catholic culture. And in Catholicism you have a dichotomy between the religious orders and the laity. The subject-matter of Catholic church music is the Mass and the cult of the saints.
What this leaves entirely out of view is normal family life--of men and women who come of age, fall in love, marry, and raise of family--who work inside or outside the home to support a family--as well as many other aspects of ordinary life, such as friendship, sports, war, adventure, exploration, the natural world, the life-cycle, &c.
These are things which the rank-and-file are going to think about, write about, sing about, and act on with or without religious guidance. By failing to integrate that larger slice of life into Christian music, it cannot be consecrated and sanctified to the glory of God.
One of the legacies of the Protestant Reformation was the notion that every Christian has a divine vocation, that the layman has a Christian calling to serve God.
This, however, did not work its way into Christian music because Lutheran music is cross-centered, while Reformed music is Psalm-centered. Bach set the Mass to music. He replaced the cult of the saints with the Passion of Christ. And he wrote a few secular cantatas, as well as many sacred cantatas. For his part, Handel set OT narrative to music--along with many Italian operas, as well as a few in English--while Mendelssohn set NT narrative to music.
Much of this marks an advance over the subject-matter of Catholic church music. There is an important place for this. But, for the most part, it still leaves the laity on the outside, looking in.
You can see the same divided piety at work in "gospel" music and the crossover artist. A gospel-singer who "crosses over" is stigmatized for cashing in on a lucrative market. And there is usually an element of moral and spiritual compromise at work here. In that respect, a crossover artist deserves to be ostracized.
Yet the standard fare of gospel music, which is all about getting saved and getting to heaven, but not much in-between, presents a severely truncated view of the Christian lifestyle. There’s more to the walk of faith than a conversion experience followed by a funeral.
It ought to be possible for a believer to sing about falling in love and staying in love without having to check his faith at the doorstep.
VII. Vox et verbum.
-i-
Every language or dialect has a distinctive timbre which tends, in turn, to cultivate a certain vocal placement.
Spoken French is beautiful, but sung French is very tricky, for sustaining the nasals produces a nasal twang, which is not at all bel canto--reminding one of Rudolf Bing’s quip that if the Met had a bad night, the Paris Opera had a bad century.
German is better for low voices than high voices. Among the great Wagnerians, Melchior was Danish, Nilsson Finnish, and Flagstad Norwegian. But Germany has produced some fine altos, baritones, and bassos.
Russian is also better for low voices than high voices--especially the basso, although Russian opera doesn’t make the same demands on the low range as the choral repertory. The women, by contrast, are often squally in the high range.
English depends on the dialect. The Oxbridge accent, however elegant for the spoken word, is fatal for the sung word.
However, other English accents seem to fare better: Forrester and Vickers are Canadians, Melba and Sutherland Aussies, Te Kanawa a New Zealander.
French, German, and English women normally have a fairly clear division between the head and chest registers. Is this an effect of language, or a result of their ecclesiastical choral tradition, with men and boys co-opting the soprano/alto line? It doesn’t have that effect on Italians, who share the same ecclesiastical tradition.
Speaking of boy sopranos, the sound which we’re accustomed to hearing today--involving a cool, pure, and straight-edged head-tone is not necessarily how the treble used to sound in times past. If you listen to Earnest Lough’s recordings from the 20s, he has a mixed tone with a natural vibrato. Although the timbre is unmistakably male, the production is more characteristic of grown woman. This may be because boys' voices broke at a later age back then--around the upper teens.
The Welsh language also turns out some fine singers (Burrows, Howell, Terfel, Price).
Black-Americans often have deep, resonant speaking voices, although they incline to a nasal or chesty production, with a rough transition over the break. You can hear this in Norman and Price when they sing around the break. Blacks have yet to produce a great operatic bass, although some black men clearly have the raw equipment. But their musical tradition selects for pop vocalism instead of classical vocalism.
The typical white American accent tends to be somewhat pinched and nasal. This works well enough for country-western, but not for classical vocalism. It has the same aesthetic appeal as Japanese opera--where you sing through the nose instead of the mouth.
Latin and Italian are best, although the placement can be a bit too forward or bottom-heavy. Spanish singers can easily pass in the Italian repertory, although Caballe, for one, has to guard against a nasal attack.
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There are partial exceptions to the rule. Crespin sang French that was both beautiful and idiomatic, but that’s because she was Italian on her mother’s side, which had a moderating influence on the placement--with its pure, open vowels and bounded phrasing.
Frida Leider was an outstanding German soprano. As a dramatic soprano, she can to cultivate the chest register, which, in turn, filled out the head-tone. She also mastered the Italian repertory, which had a further softening effect on the Teutonic vocal production--melting the Alpine frost with a shaft of southern sunshine.
VIII. Vocal technique.
-i-
The human voice naturally divides into two registers, head and chest. This is equally true of men and women, children and adults.
In men, the chest register is dominant--in women, the head. Low female voices tend to be chestier, and high men’s voices tend to be headier.
In classical vocal technique, a man sings entirely from the chest--unless he’s a dandified countertenor, whereas a woman tries to bridge the two registers by cultivating a middle voice, which is a mixed tone. If you want to hear a seamless female voice, listen to Flagstad
Because women sing in both registers, they naturally have a longer voice (wider range) than men. A male vocalist has about two usable octaves--two-and-a-half if he’s exceptional, whereas a female vocalist has about two-and-a-half usable octaves--three if she’s exceptional.
The vocal apparatus must make certain muscular adjustments in going from low to high or vice versa. In terms of vocal technique, you can build a voice from the bottom up or the top down. To some extent this corresponds with the natural range of the voice. It is more natural for a lower, heavier voice to build from the bottom-up, and a higher, lighter voice to build from the top-down.
Each technique carries a trade-off. As Jerome Hines put it, every solution has its problems. You trade high notes for low notes, a higher center of gravity for a lower center of gravity.
Take some sopranos. Flagstad, Tebaldi, Milanov, and Ponselle represent the bottom-up approach. This makes for a fulsome low and middle range, with a columnar tone and even emission of sound. These were all dramatic sopranos, with the same basic range as mezzo-sopranos.
Put another way, their voices have more chest resonance mixed into the middle voice. To some ears, this is the most beautiful type of timbre.
But there’s a price to be paid. It generally works better in slow music than fast music. And the effect is to tug the voice down, making high notes an audible effort. Also, big deep voices have a matronly, even matriarchal, tone which limits their sex appeal when they aspire to sing the virginal heroine.
By contrast, Sutherland, Caballe, and Leontyne Price represent the top-down approach. This makes for a vibrant, floating tone, with easy, ringing high notes and a round, ebullient middle range. They are basically corn-fed lyric sopranos.
Put another way, their voices have more head resonance mixed into the middle voice. To some ears, this pitches the voice at a more natural altitude, resulting in a more youthful tone and authentic soprano sound. True songbirds, they can live up there in a way a heavier voice cannot. They make their home in the branches, while their earthbound sisters live closer to the ground. A word like "warbler" comes naturally to Sutherland in a way it doesn’t to Flagstad. Flagstad is swan gliding on a pond, but La Stupenda is a nightingale in the treetops.
Music: sacred & profane-1
I. The state of the question
For about a generation or so there has been a controversy over the style of music to be used in Christian worship. This is usually cast as a choice between traditional music and contemporary music. Although that is one way of framing the debate, it is too superficial to be very discriminating.
Controversies over church music are nothing new. Augustine disapproved of women singing in church for fear it would be distracting male members of the congregation. There may be some truth to that, although it doesn’t seem to have entered his mind that men singing in church might be equally distracting to the women in attendance!
Palestrina’s all-male, a cappella music became the official touchstone of Catholic music. In England, an all-male choir means boy sopranos and countertenors, In Bavaria--boy sopranos and boy altos, in Italy--boy sopranos and castrati (well, once upon a time!)!
The Westminster Directory of Worship prescribes exclusive a cappella Psalmnody, and some Calvinists have never forgiven Watts for defiling the worship service with "uninspired" hymns.
Revivals usher in new musical styles, such as Wesley, Pantycelyn, and Sankey. The Jesus Freaks brought their steel drums, electric guitars and rock rhythms into the sanctuary, while black gospel brought dance music into choir loft--something you also find in Messianic congregations.
This illustrates a weakness with the distinction between traditional and contemporary. For some folks, "traditional" music means classical music. For others, traditional means exclusive a cappella Psalmnody. For still others, traditional means whatever music they grew up with. It’s a generational thing.
For the most part I’ve been rather dissatisfied by the piecemeal quality of the debate. For purposes of this present essay, I’ll try to broach the question in a more wide-ranging fashion.
II. Cosmology
The proverbial "music of the spheres" is not a mere figure of speech, but alludes to a full-blown musical cosmology. On the pagan side, this goes back to Pythagoras, with his ontological numerology as well as his discovery of musical ratios. Plato, in the Timaeus (35-6; 41-2; 47c-e), turned this idea into a creation-myth. The idea received a more "scientific" underpinning with Ptolemy’s work on Harmonics, as well as Nichomachus (Handbook of Harmonics [Encheiridion harmonikes]).
Greek speculation was popularized by such Roman writers as Cicero ("Somnium Scipionis," De republica 6:18), Capella, Apuleius, and Macrobius (Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis).
On the Christian side, this outlook was baptized, popularized, and systematized by Augustine (De Musica), Ammonius, Boethius (De Institutione Musica; De Nuptiis Philogiae et Mercurii), and Cassiodorus (Variae; Expositio in psalterium).
This tradition feeds directly into Dante’s cosmology and numerology. It received its penultimate scientific defense and demise at the hands of Kepler, the great Lutheran astronomer and geometer (Harmonice Mundi). And this was, in turn, the subject of a major opera by Hindemith, Die Harmonie der Welt.
In some ways, contemporary string theory is a throwback to Greek musical cosmology. So the journey has come full circle.
There is even a dash of this cosmology in Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang in unison, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
Given the degree of cultural diffusion in the ANE and the Levant, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Plato and Pythagoras were channeling some ideas which went back to the time and place of Scripture, but became garbled in the process of transmission and creative recension.
This was the thesis of Theophilus Galen in his Court of the Gentiles, and while the particulars of his argument appear pretty fanciful to modern eyes, yet the comparative historiography of Cyrus Gordon has done much to document the general phenomenon and direction of cultural diffusion.
III. Axiology
-i-
The OT temple service, by putting a premium on artistic excellence, was an expression of high culture rather than pop culture. Obviously, what represents high culture is culture-bound in terms of its concrete mode of expression. OT music was no doubt primitive compared to Classical music. But it aimed high.
In addition to the Temple, you had, at some point during the Intertestamental period, the rise of the synagogue--the inspiration for which John Frame traces to OT injunctions regarding the convocation of holy assembles (Exod 12:16; Lev 23; Num 28; 29). If the Temple reflects high culture, the synagogue reflects pop culture. It was akin a local parish church, whereas the Temple was akin to a Cathedral.
The function of the synagogue was to spread the message and cement the fellowship of the covenant community with weekly services at accessible locations.
My general point is that if we take OT precedent as a guide, then there is a place in the church for both high culture and pop culture, although we need to be critical consumers of each, and not rubber-stamp everything which either tradition or the general culture has to offer.
-ii-
This, in turn, raises the contentious issue a seeker-sensitive church. And, in Calvinism, that is an old debate, going back to the Great Awakening.
In my opinion, a worship service is for worshipers, for the believers, not unbelievers; for the edification of the faithful. So it would be a mistake to center the service on seekers.
Having said that, there is a larger sense in which the Christian faith is the most-seeker sensitive faith in the world. Ours is an outward-looking and forward-leaning faith.
And this is not merely for the benefit of the prospective convert. Without a transfusion of fresh blood, the church begins to suffer from hardening of the arteries. We fight more and more over less and less. The new birth is exchanged for either a birth-rite (baptism) or a birthright (covenant childhood).
Moreover, a service that is geared only to insiders may take too much for granted even where the insiders are concerned. They recite the same creeds and prayers year after year, sing the same hymns, yet if you were to quiz them on what the words mean, or how to defend them from Scripture, I daresay that the level of incomprehension and ignorance would be startling.
It is necessary for a pastor to explain what he’s saying and doing from time to time. This is a profitable exercise, not only for the outsiders, but the insiders as well.
That applies to music as well. Take a Charles Wesley hymn like "Hark! The herald angels, sing," "Come, o thou traveler unknown," or "And can it be that I should gain?" These are often deceptively simple. There is probably a lot that goes right over the head of the average singer. Well, the answer to ignorance is education. Before the congregation sings it, the pastor or music director should do a little exposition of the hymn.
In addition, a so-called seeker-sensitive church can be just as clubby as a high church. Printed music is dispensed with. Through sheer routine, members commit a handful of choruses to memory, so that a visitor is at a loss for either the words or the music.
The same thing with an anthem. There are times when it would be worthwhile for the choir director to explain to the congregation how the anthem is put together musically, what to listen for, how to listen for a recurrent theme, to notice how the composer employs various musical techniques to capture the mood and meaning of the text. Of course, you have to start with a quality piece of music. Frankly, if a piece of music isn’t worth explaining, it isn’t worth performing.
Much too much of modern worship, whether traditional or contemporary, is like fast food. We wolf it down and never give it a second thought.
Spiritual snobbery isn’t limited to high church circles. A snake-handlin’, King-James totin’ fundamentalist or "Spirit-filled" charismatic can look down his nose at the starched-collar crowd down the street.
Congregations, whether large or small, decompose into natural families. How open a given church is to a new comer has much less to do with a particular worship style than this invisible alliance of bloodlines.
The whole notion of "seeker-sensitive" is simplistic if the idea is to dumb down the worship to the lowest common denominator, for seekers vary in age, race, wealth, education, and taste. Some seekers are classical music buffs. For them, soft rock or country-western is not a drawing card.
If we really want to be seeker-sensitive, the answer would not be to impose some homogeneous, pop cultural style of worship, but have different churches which target different demographic groups. There is no one-size-fits-all style of worship.
Every year there are many Americans who spend thousands of dollars on a trip to Europe for the opportunity to see Renaissance art and Gothic architecture. One reason some Evangelicals convert to Orthodoxy is due to the aesthetic appeal of Orthodox worship. We need to guard against the temptation to indulge in patronizing stereotypes about the younger generation or shortchange one demographic niche as we reach out to another.
Truth be told, most folks don’t have any innate taste in art and music. They just like whatever they grew up with. They prize it for its social and emotional associations. It reminds them of the high school prom or a Billy Graham crusade.
Classical music is not all of a piece. Opera lovers are often a breed apart from chamber music connoisseurs. Only a classical music buff would enjoy Brahms or Debussy or the B Minor Mass, but everyone likes fast music--the zippy choruses of Handel and Vivaldi.
Spurgeon once said that the number of folks saved by fine music and stained-glass windows amounted to the tenth part of nothing. The allusion was, of course, to the Church of England--that magnificent museum-piece of dead formalism.
However, I also can’t help recalling that during the Downgrade controversy, Spurgeon was just as isolated as Bishop Ryle. When the chips were down, both men stood alone for the word of life.
I also recall that Jonathan Edwards was railroaded out of town by veterans of the Great Awakening, who had been converted under his own ministry.
On the other hand, Edwards’ Old Light opponent, Charles Chauncy went from nominal Presbyterian to damnable unitarian.
The Old Lights were half-right. The idea of every-member evangelism is a bit airy-fairy. Between work and kids, most parents don’t have much time left over. Christian nurture is the backbone of the church. Raising kids in the faith is their chief contribution to world evangelism.
Having said that, they can witness to their friends, relatives, and coworkers. And their children, if godly, can witness to their friends and neighbors as well. So it’s a concentric form of evangelism.
But the Old Lights were half-wrong as well. The reason they were so stung by the charge of an unconverted ministry preaching an unfelt Christ is that it cut too close to the bone. To oppose the work of Edwards and Whitfield, to oppose revival because it overturns the apple cart, is to miss the day of the Lord’s visitation.
There are churches which used to preach to believers in the morning and unbelievers in the evening. This is, of course, a mite formulaic. Solid, expository preaching is Gospel-preaching, too. And we can’t neatly divide the present company into believers and unbelievers.
Still, there’s a place for a straight evangelistic sermon every now and then. Never take anything for granted. And by that same token, it isn’t bad, now and again, for a pastor to act as though his whole flock were seekers.
There’s a danger, when you hear the same thing over and over again, of ceasing to feel that it applies to you. You know it all, you’ve heard it all before. The message must be for the guy beside you or behind you. So there’s a certain value in having the pastor occasionally treat believers as unbelievers, in not presuming their state of grace, in having them revisit the Exodus.
New lights are better at starting a fire, old lights at stoking a fire. But, eventually, the fire dies down, at which point it needs to be rekindled. Old lights and new lights need each other at different times. New lights are the spark, old lights the log. Without a match, there is no fire to conserve; without firewood, the fire flames out. Without the accelerant of revival and the fuel of evangelism, the old lights become firemen, trying to hose down and snuff out any ember of spiritual vitality and new life.
-iii-
Assuming, then, that there is a place, if not for bad music, but for better and best, are there any objective standards for winnowing the wheat from the chaff, or is merely a matter of personal taste? There are a number of factors which figure in an answer.
In terms of absolute music, some styles are more sophisticated than others. Now, good music can be simple--say, a Celtic folk tune--and bad music can be complex--atonalism, serialism.
But I would say that sophistication is a necessary, if insufficient, condition of great music. Not all good music is great music, but all great music is good music.
By "sophistication," I mean a certain level of craftsmanship, of technical know-how. In this respect, Bach is the gold standard.
In addition, some melodies have more developmental potential than others. They can be scaled up or scaled down.
There is also a difference between good music and beautiful music. This is especially evident in vocal music.
Take a sacred favorite like "Panis Angelicus." Most music-lovers would regard this as a beautiful piece of music. However, it’s not good music. It starts out on a promising note. Indeed, that’s what lingers in the mind--the first few bars. But it quickly falls apart.
Why is that? Because the inspiration of the song is verbal rather than musical. Franck plays off the natural lilt of the Latin text. The fine-sprung rhythm of the words nearly writes its own tune--nearly, but not quite. That’s not enough to sustain the piece. After the few bars it quickly degenerates into random repetition and filler. It lacks a core melody, so there’s nothing to develop.
Another reason that a song like "Panis Angelicus" sounds better than it really is that if you put a plush voice behind it, the sensuous appeal of the voice conceals the poverty of melodic invention.
This holds true of a lot of Italian opera. There’s a reason so much music is set to an Italian libretto--not just for Italian composers, but Germans like Mozart and Handel. The language itself is so cantabile and bel canto to begin with. Add to that a warm Mediterranean voice, as well as the lush string section, and the effect is very pleasing to the ear. Indeed, it seduces the ear and disarms the critical faculty--just like a man may fall for a bad woman if she’s good looking!
But one of the cruelest things you can do to expose bad opera music is to play a piano score. It is much harder to cheat on a keyboard. The keyboard is quite unforgiving of weak underlying material.
Bellini is a good example. A Bellini aria sounds beautiful if sung by a Sutherland or Caballe or Ponselle or Pavarotti or Milanov. If, however, you were to leave out the voice and play the whole thing on piano, the melody would seem rather trite; hardly a melody at all--more akin to Sprechstimme, like Gregorian chant. The same thing is true with Puccini. The vocal line is mostly recitative, while the aria is an extension of the recitative. Although we associate Sprechgesang with 20C German works, you can hear it in the Italians as well.
And if you play a Bellini chorus on piano, his lack of craftsmanship is even more evident, for a decent chorus demands harmony as well as melody--harmony as melody squared. Bellini’s problem is twofold--he doesn’t have enough raw material to scale up in the first place, and he lacks the technical competence to do good part-writing.
If you try this experiment with a piano scoring of Mozart or Handel, they fare much better. One reason, I expect, is that German is less singable than Latin or Italian. The placement is better for low voices than high voices. And it lacks rhythmic impetus of Italian or Latin. As a consequence, German music is more architectonic. This is true whether you’re talking about Bach or Brahms, Mendelssohn or Hindemith.
And this is, in my opinion, one reason that Germany continued to produce some first-rate music in the Romantic era whereas there is nothing of the same stature on the Italian side of the equation. There were some bad German composers as well as some great German composers, but Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini are not on the same plane as Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. Even a hit-and-miss composer like Schumann has some really fine pieces.
Now, if you go back to the Baroque era, the Italian is just as satisfying as the German Baroque. What happened?
Well, what do you think of when you think of the Italian Baroque? The first thing which comes to mind is the lush string sound. That, however, is all about timbre, not about structure.
Another thing we think of are those grand and glorious crescendi. If, however, you compare Vivaldi with Bach or Handel, he composes is shorter units. And this, again, goes back to the fact that he doesn’t have as much structural depth as his German contemporaries. He has tremendous energy, but he cannot build or sustain a climax to the same degree. The melodies are shorter, and the movements briefer.
-iv-
Yet another criterion is the relation between music and nature. Too much modern music is nine parts theory to one part music. Yet just as the function of formal logic is not to take the place of informal logic, but to systematize informal reasoning so that we can test the validity of an inference and fill in the missing steps--the traditional function of music theory was not to displace spontaneous invention, but to systematize inspiration so that a composer could elaborate a tune in a wide variety of ways.
There is, in the arts, a creative tension between form and freedom. Unfettered freedom poses a mental block, because it presents the creative artist with too many choices. He has nowhere to begin, nowhere to go, no goal. But excessive formality, or an arbitrary form, presents the creative artist with too few choices to channel his imagination.
In the popular imagination, dissonance is the one thing most associated with modern music. The absence of melody, the absence of euphony.
The culprit in this is, of course, the atonal school--a la Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern. It’s not so much that atonal composers aim for dissonance. Rather, this is the consequence of what they avoid--classical scales and harmonic sonorities. The effect, however, is a solid wall of cacophony--albeit a highly methodical rather than random cacophony, generated by a dodecaphonic algorithm.
Connoisseurs listen to atonalism or serialism as a kind of civil duty. Like imbibing medicine, the sour taste and acrid aftertaste makes the duty all the more virtuous.
Since, however, I don’t subscribe to supererogatory merit, whether in theology or musicology, I don’t see why I should submit to this penance!
A great composer doesn’t generally set out to compose great music. He writes whatever he likes. He writes to express, rather than impress. He may be inspired by a melody or libretto. He may be solving a musical problem he poses for himself. If the result is great music, that is not because the composer was self-consciously writing a great piece of music, but because he was a great composer.
But a lot of modern music takes itself far too seriously. It is weighed down by its lead-footed self-importance. The aim is impress rather than express.
In this it differs, and differs deliberately, from the great religious music of the past. What we are witnessing is the contraction and collapse of the semiotic dimension--the musical analogue of abstraction in the fine arts and deconstruction in literature--where there is nothing outside the text. This steady progression, or should I say, regression, is accessory to secularism.
Christian composers took God seriously. He was the object of art. Even what God was not the textual referent, as in the case of chamber music, Protestant theology regarded the lay lifestyle as a sacred calling no less than the clerical vocation. All was done to the greater glory of God. Music was important as a consecrated offering "to" God, as much as it was "about" God.
But in the transition to mundanity, there was a shift from God to the world, as exemplified in opera music, which is androcentric, and then in landscape music like Debussy’s La Mer or Ibéria--which alluded to the subanimate order. Notice that the more secular the art, the more impersonal it becomes. Like a suicide-cult, humanism promises ambrosia, but dispenses arsenic. This was a concern of Husserl's in The Crisis of European Sciences.
Finally, you get atonalism and serialism--where technique becomes an end it itself, rather than a means to an end: syntax without semantics, like a formal system. This is a self-referential game in which God, man, and the world are banished. Music loses its allusive, allegorical power. Music is now at war with its own medium, as music theory comes to impose its iron will on acoustics rather than exploiting the science of sound. Destruction ex nihilo takes the place of creation ex nihilo.
Serialism represents a limiting-case of atonalism. Atonalism eschewed the consonant intervals, but was more conventional with respect to other attributes of music, viz., rhythm, timbre, meter, duration, dynamics. Serialism attempted to round out the atonal revolution.
But when everything is a free variable, absent harmony, melody or periodicity, the result is chaotic. In an effort to supply a principle of stability, serial music is algorithmic and automatic. The ironic effect, however, is that serial music might as well be white noise. It never sounds more disorderly than when the outcome is rigidly ordered: nihilism by numbers. To the ear, even a trained ear, the formulaic flux of Pierre Boulez sounds about as random as the accidental "music" of John Cage.
This is the music of apostate man, at war with God and the world. To be a religious rebel, to be in rebellion against your Maker, is to be in rebellion against his handiwork. If you take God to be your enemy, then this hostility will bleed into the creaturely realm, for it bears the divine imprint.
Literature and the fine arts have charted the same downward curve. Of course, any technique can still be pressed into service if a composer wants to set words to music. But the center of gravity lies elsewhere.
There is a certain parallel here between Berg or Boulez and James Joyce: a great deal of surface complexity at the expense of linear form. And the effect is to alienate the artist from the audience. If you make art too much of a chore, most folks, even art, music, and book-lovers will simply not bother with it. Joyce forgot the first rule of story-telling: to tell a good story. Berg forgot the first rule of music, to compose a tune you can whistle.
When art ceases to please, and begins to bark orders at us, it loses our allegiance. We are not indentured servants to the high altar of art. Therein lies the secret of Verdi and Rossini: in the shower stall, every man can sing like Robert Merrill or Luciano Pavarotti!
Yet common grace will frequently conserve a subliminal reverence for natural revelation. Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition, Deniélou’s Sémantique Musicale, Salzer’s Structural Hearing and Tonal Coherence, as well as Ansermet’s Les Fondements de la Musique all represent earnest efforts at adapting music theory to the natural order rather than adapting the natural order to music theory.
My purpose is not to offer a blanket endorsement of any particular approach, but to commend the general approach. It is of passing interest that Hindemith, though German, was an enemy of atonalism while Boulez, while French, was an apprentice of atonalism.
In my opinion, the purpose of dissonance is rhythmic and dramatic. We associate rhythm with the beat, but rhythm in this narrow sense is tactile rather than auditory. Deaf men and women can dance because they can feel the beat.
But dissonance, when it inheres is a consonant/dissonant pattern of tension-and-release, is the musical analogue of rhythm. It is a purely auditory, and in that respect, a purely musical phenomenon.
It is also the musical equivalent of conflict/resolution in drama. Thus, the judicious use of dissonance subserves dramatic and musical values alike by simulating rhythmic propulsion and emotional compulsion.
-v-
And this is, in turn, bound up with the narrative character of classical music--of music with a dramatic arc, of music which tells a story, with or without words.
Poulenc was once asked why he had never composed any oratorios. He answer was that Roman Catholics set prayer to music, whereas Evangelicals set drama to music.
This is insightful in part because it may to explain the convergent development of vocal music and absolute music, as well as the divergent development of Catholic and Evangelical music.
To compose what is essentially incidental music for a few liturgical set-pieces does not demand the same syntactical resources as setting historical drama to music. And a musical syntax engineered to cope with dramatic demands of an oratorio or Passion can then be transferred and further elaborated in relation to absolute music. This may be one reason why the musical texture of Catholic composers is thinner than that of their Protestant counterparts.
In setting prayer to music, you want to conjure up a meditative mood--with subtle inflections in tone and timbre. The composer’s focus is on centering one’s thought--even stilling one’s thought. I’m speaking, now, of prayer in the Catholic contemplative tradition. The Protestant theology of prayer is quite different.
But historical drama demands a more dynamic style and chiaroscuro technique to capture the mood-swings and propel the action. Composing on a large scale calls for a wide tonal variety to alleviate tedium, as well as enough architectonic hardware to keep the thing in once piece.
For about a generation or so there has been a controversy over the style of music to be used in Christian worship. This is usually cast as a choice between traditional music and contemporary music. Although that is one way of framing the debate, it is too superficial to be very discriminating.
Controversies over church music are nothing new. Augustine disapproved of women singing in church for fear it would be distracting male members of the congregation. There may be some truth to that, although it doesn’t seem to have entered his mind that men singing in church might be equally distracting to the women in attendance!
Palestrina’s all-male, a cappella music became the official touchstone of Catholic music. In England, an all-male choir means boy sopranos and countertenors, In Bavaria--boy sopranos and boy altos, in Italy--boy sopranos and castrati (well, once upon a time!)!
The Westminster Directory of Worship prescribes exclusive a cappella Psalmnody, and some Calvinists have never forgiven Watts for defiling the worship service with "uninspired" hymns.
Revivals usher in new musical styles, such as Wesley, Pantycelyn, and Sankey. The Jesus Freaks brought their steel drums, electric guitars and rock rhythms into the sanctuary, while black gospel brought dance music into choir loft--something you also find in Messianic congregations.
This illustrates a weakness with the distinction between traditional and contemporary. For some folks, "traditional" music means classical music. For others, traditional means exclusive a cappella Psalmnody. For still others, traditional means whatever music they grew up with. It’s a generational thing.
For the most part I’ve been rather dissatisfied by the piecemeal quality of the debate. For purposes of this present essay, I’ll try to broach the question in a more wide-ranging fashion.
II. Cosmology
The proverbial "music of the spheres" is not a mere figure of speech, but alludes to a full-blown musical cosmology. On the pagan side, this goes back to Pythagoras, with his ontological numerology as well as his discovery of musical ratios. Plato, in the Timaeus (35-6; 41-2; 47c-e), turned this idea into a creation-myth. The idea received a more "scientific" underpinning with Ptolemy’s work on Harmonics, as well as Nichomachus (Handbook of Harmonics [Encheiridion harmonikes]).
Greek speculation was popularized by such Roman writers as Cicero ("Somnium Scipionis," De republica 6:18), Capella, Apuleius, and Macrobius (Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis).
On the Christian side, this outlook was baptized, popularized, and systematized by Augustine (De Musica), Ammonius, Boethius (De Institutione Musica; De Nuptiis Philogiae et Mercurii), and Cassiodorus (Variae; Expositio in psalterium).
This tradition feeds directly into Dante’s cosmology and numerology. It received its penultimate scientific defense and demise at the hands of Kepler, the great Lutheran astronomer and geometer (Harmonice Mundi). And this was, in turn, the subject of a major opera by Hindemith, Die Harmonie der Welt.
In some ways, contemporary string theory is a throwback to Greek musical cosmology. So the journey has come full circle.
There is even a dash of this cosmology in Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang in unison, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
Given the degree of cultural diffusion in the ANE and the Levant, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Plato and Pythagoras were channeling some ideas which went back to the time and place of Scripture, but became garbled in the process of transmission and creative recension.
This was the thesis of Theophilus Galen in his Court of the Gentiles, and while the particulars of his argument appear pretty fanciful to modern eyes, yet the comparative historiography of Cyrus Gordon has done much to document the general phenomenon and direction of cultural diffusion.
III. Axiology
-i-
The OT temple service, by putting a premium on artistic excellence, was an expression of high culture rather than pop culture. Obviously, what represents high culture is culture-bound in terms of its concrete mode of expression. OT music was no doubt primitive compared to Classical music. But it aimed high.
In addition to the Temple, you had, at some point during the Intertestamental period, the rise of the synagogue--the inspiration for which John Frame traces to OT injunctions regarding the convocation of holy assembles (Exod 12:16; Lev 23; Num 28; 29). If the Temple reflects high culture, the synagogue reflects pop culture. It was akin a local parish church, whereas the Temple was akin to a Cathedral.
The function of the synagogue was to spread the message and cement the fellowship of the covenant community with weekly services at accessible locations.
My general point is that if we take OT precedent as a guide, then there is a place in the church for both high culture and pop culture, although we need to be critical consumers of each, and not rubber-stamp everything which either tradition or the general culture has to offer.
-ii-
This, in turn, raises the contentious issue a seeker-sensitive church. And, in Calvinism, that is an old debate, going back to the Great Awakening.
In my opinion, a worship service is for worshipers, for the believers, not unbelievers; for the edification of the faithful. So it would be a mistake to center the service on seekers.
Having said that, there is a larger sense in which the Christian faith is the most-seeker sensitive faith in the world. Ours is an outward-looking and forward-leaning faith.
And this is not merely for the benefit of the prospective convert. Without a transfusion of fresh blood, the church begins to suffer from hardening of the arteries. We fight more and more over less and less. The new birth is exchanged for either a birth-rite (baptism) or a birthright (covenant childhood).
Moreover, a service that is geared only to insiders may take too much for granted even where the insiders are concerned. They recite the same creeds and prayers year after year, sing the same hymns, yet if you were to quiz them on what the words mean, or how to defend them from Scripture, I daresay that the level of incomprehension and ignorance would be startling.
It is necessary for a pastor to explain what he’s saying and doing from time to time. This is a profitable exercise, not only for the outsiders, but the insiders as well.
That applies to music as well. Take a Charles Wesley hymn like "Hark! The herald angels, sing," "Come, o thou traveler unknown," or "And can it be that I should gain?" These are often deceptively simple. There is probably a lot that goes right over the head of the average singer. Well, the answer to ignorance is education. Before the congregation sings it, the pastor or music director should do a little exposition of the hymn.
In addition, a so-called seeker-sensitive church can be just as clubby as a high church. Printed music is dispensed with. Through sheer routine, members commit a handful of choruses to memory, so that a visitor is at a loss for either the words or the music.
The same thing with an anthem. There are times when it would be worthwhile for the choir director to explain to the congregation how the anthem is put together musically, what to listen for, how to listen for a recurrent theme, to notice how the composer employs various musical techniques to capture the mood and meaning of the text. Of course, you have to start with a quality piece of music. Frankly, if a piece of music isn’t worth explaining, it isn’t worth performing.
Much too much of modern worship, whether traditional or contemporary, is like fast food. We wolf it down and never give it a second thought.
Spiritual snobbery isn’t limited to high church circles. A snake-handlin’, King-James totin’ fundamentalist or "Spirit-filled" charismatic can look down his nose at the starched-collar crowd down the street.
Congregations, whether large or small, decompose into natural families. How open a given church is to a new comer has much less to do with a particular worship style than this invisible alliance of bloodlines.
The whole notion of "seeker-sensitive" is simplistic if the idea is to dumb down the worship to the lowest common denominator, for seekers vary in age, race, wealth, education, and taste. Some seekers are classical music buffs. For them, soft rock or country-western is not a drawing card.
If we really want to be seeker-sensitive, the answer would not be to impose some homogeneous, pop cultural style of worship, but have different churches which target different demographic groups. There is no one-size-fits-all style of worship.
Every year there are many Americans who spend thousands of dollars on a trip to Europe for the opportunity to see Renaissance art and Gothic architecture. One reason some Evangelicals convert to Orthodoxy is due to the aesthetic appeal of Orthodox worship. We need to guard against the temptation to indulge in patronizing stereotypes about the younger generation or shortchange one demographic niche as we reach out to another.
Truth be told, most folks don’t have any innate taste in art and music. They just like whatever they grew up with. They prize it for its social and emotional associations. It reminds them of the high school prom or a Billy Graham crusade.
Classical music is not all of a piece. Opera lovers are often a breed apart from chamber music connoisseurs. Only a classical music buff would enjoy Brahms or Debussy or the B Minor Mass, but everyone likes fast music--the zippy choruses of Handel and Vivaldi.
Spurgeon once said that the number of folks saved by fine music and stained-glass windows amounted to the tenth part of nothing. The allusion was, of course, to the Church of England--that magnificent museum-piece of dead formalism.
However, I also can’t help recalling that during the Downgrade controversy, Spurgeon was just as isolated as Bishop Ryle. When the chips were down, both men stood alone for the word of life.
I also recall that Jonathan Edwards was railroaded out of town by veterans of the Great Awakening, who had been converted under his own ministry.
On the other hand, Edwards’ Old Light opponent, Charles Chauncy went from nominal Presbyterian to damnable unitarian.
The Old Lights were half-right. The idea of every-member evangelism is a bit airy-fairy. Between work and kids, most parents don’t have much time left over. Christian nurture is the backbone of the church. Raising kids in the faith is their chief contribution to world evangelism.
Having said that, they can witness to their friends, relatives, and coworkers. And their children, if godly, can witness to their friends and neighbors as well. So it’s a concentric form of evangelism.
But the Old Lights were half-wrong as well. The reason they were so stung by the charge of an unconverted ministry preaching an unfelt Christ is that it cut too close to the bone. To oppose the work of Edwards and Whitfield, to oppose revival because it overturns the apple cart, is to miss the day of the Lord’s visitation.
There are churches which used to preach to believers in the morning and unbelievers in the evening. This is, of course, a mite formulaic. Solid, expository preaching is Gospel-preaching, too. And we can’t neatly divide the present company into believers and unbelievers.
Still, there’s a place for a straight evangelistic sermon every now and then. Never take anything for granted. And by that same token, it isn’t bad, now and again, for a pastor to act as though his whole flock were seekers.
There’s a danger, when you hear the same thing over and over again, of ceasing to feel that it applies to you. You know it all, you’ve heard it all before. The message must be for the guy beside you or behind you. So there’s a certain value in having the pastor occasionally treat believers as unbelievers, in not presuming their state of grace, in having them revisit the Exodus.
New lights are better at starting a fire, old lights at stoking a fire. But, eventually, the fire dies down, at which point it needs to be rekindled. Old lights and new lights need each other at different times. New lights are the spark, old lights the log. Without a match, there is no fire to conserve; without firewood, the fire flames out. Without the accelerant of revival and the fuel of evangelism, the old lights become firemen, trying to hose down and snuff out any ember of spiritual vitality and new life.
-iii-
Assuming, then, that there is a place, if not for bad music, but for better and best, are there any objective standards for winnowing the wheat from the chaff, or is merely a matter of personal taste? There are a number of factors which figure in an answer.
In terms of absolute music, some styles are more sophisticated than others. Now, good music can be simple--say, a Celtic folk tune--and bad music can be complex--atonalism, serialism.
But I would say that sophistication is a necessary, if insufficient, condition of great music. Not all good music is great music, but all great music is good music.
By "sophistication," I mean a certain level of craftsmanship, of technical know-how. In this respect, Bach is the gold standard.
In addition, some melodies have more developmental potential than others. They can be scaled up or scaled down.
There is also a difference between good music and beautiful music. This is especially evident in vocal music.
Take a sacred favorite like "Panis Angelicus." Most music-lovers would regard this as a beautiful piece of music. However, it’s not good music. It starts out on a promising note. Indeed, that’s what lingers in the mind--the first few bars. But it quickly falls apart.
Why is that? Because the inspiration of the song is verbal rather than musical. Franck plays off the natural lilt of the Latin text. The fine-sprung rhythm of the words nearly writes its own tune--nearly, but not quite. That’s not enough to sustain the piece. After the few bars it quickly degenerates into random repetition and filler. It lacks a core melody, so there’s nothing to develop.
Another reason that a song like "Panis Angelicus" sounds better than it really is that if you put a plush voice behind it, the sensuous appeal of the voice conceals the poverty of melodic invention.
This holds true of a lot of Italian opera. There’s a reason so much music is set to an Italian libretto--not just for Italian composers, but Germans like Mozart and Handel. The language itself is so cantabile and bel canto to begin with. Add to that a warm Mediterranean voice, as well as the lush string section, and the effect is very pleasing to the ear. Indeed, it seduces the ear and disarms the critical faculty--just like a man may fall for a bad woman if she’s good looking!
But one of the cruelest things you can do to expose bad opera music is to play a piano score. It is much harder to cheat on a keyboard. The keyboard is quite unforgiving of weak underlying material.
Bellini is a good example. A Bellini aria sounds beautiful if sung by a Sutherland or Caballe or Ponselle or Pavarotti or Milanov. If, however, you were to leave out the voice and play the whole thing on piano, the melody would seem rather trite; hardly a melody at all--more akin to Sprechstimme, like Gregorian chant. The same thing is true with Puccini. The vocal line is mostly recitative, while the aria is an extension of the recitative. Although we associate Sprechgesang with 20C German works, you can hear it in the Italians as well.
And if you play a Bellini chorus on piano, his lack of craftsmanship is even more evident, for a decent chorus demands harmony as well as melody--harmony as melody squared. Bellini’s problem is twofold--he doesn’t have enough raw material to scale up in the first place, and he lacks the technical competence to do good part-writing.
If you try this experiment with a piano scoring of Mozart or Handel, they fare much better. One reason, I expect, is that German is less singable than Latin or Italian. The placement is better for low voices than high voices. And it lacks rhythmic impetus of Italian or Latin. As a consequence, German music is more architectonic. This is true whether you’re talking about Bach or Brahms, Mendelssohn or Hindemith.
And this is, in my opinion, one reason that Germany continued to produce some first-rate music in the Romantic era whereas there is nothing of the same stature on the Italian side of the equation. There were some bad German composers as well as some great German composers, but Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini are not on the same plane as Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. Even a hit-and-miss composer like Schumann has some really fine pieces.
Now, if you go back to the Baroque era, the Italian is just as satisfying as the German Baroque. What happened?
Well, what do you think of when you think of the Italian Baroque? The first thing which comes to mind is the lush string sound. That, however, is all about timbre, not about structure.
Another thing we think of are those grand and glorious crescendi. If, however, you compare Vivaldi with Bach or Handel, he composes is shorter units. And this, again, goes back to the fact that he doesn’t have as much structural depth as his German contemporaries. He has tremendous energy, but he cannot build or sustain a climax to the same degree. The melodies are shorter, and the movements briefer.
-iv-
Yet another criterion is the relation between music and nature. Too much modern music is nine parts theory to one part music. Yet just as the function of formal logic is not to take the place of informal logic, but to systematize informal reasoning so that we can test the validity of an inference and fill in the missing steps--the traditional function of music theory was not to displace spontaneous invention, but to systematize inspiration so that a composer could elaborate a tune in a wide variety of ways.
There is, in the arts, a creative tension between form and freedom. Unfettered freedom poses a mental block, because it presents the creative artist with too many choices. He has nowhere to begin, nowhere to go, no goal. But excessive formality, or an arbitrary form, presents the creative artist with too few choices to channel his imagination.
In the popular imagination, dissonance is the one thing most associated with modern music. The absence of melody, the absence of euphony.
The culprit in this is, of course, the atonal school--a la Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern. It’s not so much that atonal composers aim for dissonance. Rather, this is the consequence of what they avoid--classical scales and harmonic sonorities. The effect, however, is a solid wall of cacophony--albeit a highly methodical rather than random cacophony, generated by a dodecaphonic algorithm.
Connoisseurs listen to atonalism or serialism as a kind of civil duty. Like imbibing medicine, the sour taste and acrid aftertaste makes the duty all the more virtuous.
Since, however, I don’t subscribe to supererogatory merit, whether in theology or musicology, I don’t see why I should submit to this penance!
A great composer doesn’t generally set out to compose great music. He writes whatever he likes. He writes to express, rather than impress. He may be inspired by a melody or libretto. He may be solving a musical problem he poses for himself. If the result is great music, that is not because the composer was self-consciously writing a great piece of music, but because he was a great composer.
But a lot of modern music takes itself far too seriously. It is weighed down by its lead-footed self-importance. The aim is impress rather than express.
In this it differs, and differs deliberately, from the great religious music of the past. What we are witnessing is the contraction and collapse of the semiotic dimension--the musical analogue of abstraction in the fine arts and deconstruction in literature--where there is nothing outside the text. This steady progression, or should I say, regression, is accessory to secularism.
Christian composers took God seriously. He was the object of art. Even what God was not the textual referent, as in the case of chamber music, Protestant theology regarded the lay lifestyle as a sacred calling no less than the clerical vocation. All was done to the greater glory of God. Music was important as a consecrated offering "to" God, as much as it was "about" God.
But in the transition to mundanity, there was a shift from God to the world, as exemplified in opera music, which is androcentric, and then in landscape music like Debussy’s La Mer or Ibéria--which alluded to the subanimate order. Notice that the more secular the art, the more impersonal it becomes. Like a suicide-cult, humanism promises ambrosia, but dispenses arsenic. This was a concern of Husserl's in The Crisis of European Sciences.
Finally, you get atonalism and serialism--where technique becomes an end it itself, rather than a means to an end: syntax without semantics, like a formal system. This is a self-referential game in which God, man, and the world are banished. Music loses its allusive, allegorical power. Music is now at war with its own medium, as music theory comes to impose its iron will on acoustics rather than exploiting the science of sound. Destruction ex nihilo takes the place of creation ex nihilo.
Serialism represents a limiting-case of atonalism. Atonalism eschewed the consonant intervals, but was more conventional with respect to other attributes of music, viz., rhythm, timbre, meter, duration, dynamics. Serialism attempted to round out the atonal revolution.
But when everything is a free variable, absent harmony, melody or periodicity, the result is chaotic. In an effort to supply a principle of stability, serial music is algorithmic and automatic. The ironic effect, however, is that serial music might as well be white noise. It never sounds more disorderly than when the outcome is rigidly ordered: nihilism by numbers. To the ear, even a trained ear, the formulaic flux of Pierre Boulez sounds about as random as the accidental "music" of John Cage.
This is the music of apostate man, at war with God and the world. To be a religious rebel, to be in rebellion against your Maker, is to be in rebellion against his handiwork. If you take God to be your enemy, then this hostility will bleed into the creaturely realm, for it bears the divine imprint.
Literature and the fine arts have charted the same downward curve. Of course, any technique can still be pressed into service if a composer wants to set words to music. But the center of gravity lies elsewhere.
There is a certain parallel here between Berg or Boulez and James Joyce: a great deal of surface complexity at the expense of linear form. And the effect is to alienate the artist from the audience. If you make art too much of a chore, most folks, even art, music, and book-lovers will simply not bother with it. Joyce forgot the first rule of story-telling: to tell a good story. Berg forgot the first rule of music, to compose a tune you can whistle.
When art ceases to please, and begins to bark orders at us, it loses our allegiance. We are not indentured servants to the high altar of art. Therein lies the secret of Verdi and Rossini: in the shower stall, every man can sing like Robert Merrill or Luciano Pavarotti!
Yet common grace will frequently conserve a subliminal reverence for natural revelation. Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition, Deniélou’s Sémantique Musicale, Salzer’s Structural Hearing and Tonal Coherence, as well as Ansermet’s Les Fondements de la Musique all represent earnest efforts at adapting music theory to the natural order rather than adapting the natural order to music theory.
My purpose is not to offer a blanket endorsement of any particular approach, but to commend the general approach. It is of passing interest that Hindemith, though German, was an enemy of atonalism while Boulez, while French, was an apprentice of atonalism.
In my opinion, the purpose of dissonance is rhythmic and dramatic. We associate rhythm with the beat, but rhythm in this narrow sense is tactile rather than auditory. Deaf men and women can dance because they can feel the beat.
But dissonance, when it inheres is a consonant/dissonant pattern of tension-and-release, is the musical analogue of rhythm. It is a purely auditory, and in that respect, a purely musical phenomenon.
It is also the musical equivalent of conflict/resolution in drama. Thus, the judicious use of dissonance subserves dramatic and musical values alike by simulating rhythmic propulsion and emotional compulsion.
-v-
And this is, in turn, bound up with the narrative character of classical music--of music with a dramatic arc, of music which tells a story, with or without words.
Poulenc was once asked why he had never composed any oratorios. He answer was that Roman Catholics set prayer to music, whereas Evangelicals set drama to music.
This is insightful in part because it may to explain the convergent development of vocal music and absolute music, as well as the divergent development of Catholic and Evangelical music.
To compose what is essentially incidental music for a few liturgical set-pieces does not demand the same syntactical resources as setting historical drama to music. And a musical syntax engineered to cope with dramatic demands of an oratorio or Passion can then be transferred and further elaborated in relation to absolute music. This may be one reason why the musical texture of Catholic composers is thinner than that of their Protestant counterparts.
In setting prayer to music, you want to conjure up a meditative mood--with subtle inflections in tone and timbre. The composer’s focus is on centering one’s thought--even stilling one’s thought. I’m speaking, now, of prayer in the Catholic contemplative tradition. The Protestant theology of prayer is quite different.
But historical drama demands a more dynamic style and chiaroscuro technique to capture the mood-swings and propel the action. Composing on a large scale calls for a wide tonal variety to alleviate tedium, as well as enough architectonic hardware to keep the thing in once piece.
Monday, January 17, 2005
The thick rotundity of the earth
Is a flat earth an article of faith among Bible-believing Christians? Every now and then a liberal or outright unbeliever will accuse the Christian of inconsistency for failing to credit the biblical witness to a flat earth. This accusation is made, not because the accuser believes in a flat earth, much less because he believes in the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Quite the contrary, he brings this up to embarrass the Christian and put pressure on his faith. A unbeliever will bring this up to show that faith in Scripture is absurd, while a liberal will bring it up as a wedge issue to show that we ought to hang loose about the inspiration and authority of Scripture and demythologize it at will, subordinating Scripture to prevailing philosophy of the day.
Both the liberal and the unbeliever will use this as a double-daring dilemma. They will seize on some "outlandish" claim of Scripture and parade it under the nose of the Christian. If a Christian dares to call their bluff, this will prove that he's beyond the reach of rational discourse. If a Christian declines to call their bluff, this will prove that he really doesn't believe the Bible either. What are we to make of this?
1. As a matter of fact, a Christian is honor-bound to affirm whatever the Bible affirms, and to deny whatever the Bible denies. This follows from its identity as the word of God, the word of the omniscient and almighty Maker of the world.
That doesn't mean that a Christian is expected to swallow a whole lot of nonsense. For the God of the Bible is a rational God--is, indeed--the exemplar of reason. However, this is not a standard or selection-criterion that we impose on Scripture, choosing what we're prepared to believe. Rather, this is a presupposition of our faith in Scripture. Whatever God says, even if it should, in some cases, go against the available evidence, is still to be believed.
2. This debate usually operates on the assumption that primitive people believed in a flat earth. This, however, seems to be a bit of academic propaganda to promote modernity over against Christian tradition. A good corrective to this is supplied by J. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger Paperback 1997).
Another informative treatment is supplied by C. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Adventures Unlimited Press 1996). On the basis of comparative ancient cartography, Hapgood illustrates a knowledge of spherical trigonometry dating back thousands of years.
In addition, Hugh Moran & David Kelley, in their monograph on The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs (Daily Press 1969), have documented the phenomenon of ancient transoceanic navigation.
There is, then, no prima facie presumption that Bible writers believed in a flat earth. And, indeed, if Noah built an ark to cope with the demands of a global flood, then this technology would pass on to his descendants--and thereby kick-start circumnavigation.
The ancients, who were far more attuned to nature than most moderns, were hardly unobservant. It would be a simple thing to analogize from the shape of the sun and moon to the shape of the earth.
Likewise, one of the early proofs for the sphericity of the earth was the phenomenon of departing ships disappearing below the horizon, or approaching ships reappearing above the horizon. The Greeks inferred the sphericity of the earth from this observation.
Now thousands of the ancients had had occasion to observe this common phenomenon, and it's reasonable to assume that the more intelligent among them drew the same inference, even if we have no records to that effect. We have no records for most things that were ever thought, said, and done--yet we don't depend on a record to know that certain things had to be to get from where they were to where we are today.
So when we approach the Bible we need to clear our minds of modern-day prejudice.
3. The Bible generally depicts earthly events at the eye-level perspective of an earthbound observer, since it was revealed for the benefit of earthlings rather than Martians!
And that relative reference-frame is accurate as far as it goes. After all, most modern astronomy is ground-based astronomy.
Beyond that, it's not so much that Scripture depicts the earth as flat, but rather as cubical. That is to say, the OT sometimes represents the world as a house built by God. This isn't an accommodation to obsolete science or mythology. Rather, it's a theological model. It portrays the Lord as the architect of the world. The world is a "house" (Job 38:4-6) with "windows" (Gen. 7:11; 8:2; 2 Kings 7:2, 19; Is. 24:18; Mal. 3:10) and "doors" (1 Kings 9:35; 2 Chron. 6:26; 7:13; Ps. 78:23; Rev. 4:1; 11:6; 19:11) and "stairs" (Gen 28:12; Amos 9:6). This is picture-language--but with a purpose.
In addition to the "housing" metaphor there is the figuration of the cosmic "tent." This sets up an intentional parallel involving the tabernacle as a microcosm of the cosmos. For a full vetting of these connections, cf. G. Beale, The Temple and the Church's Mission (IVP 2004); D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (HarperCollins 1988), 78-99.
4. Intellectual snobbery has a pecking order. The Darwinist looks down upon the creationist, the creationist looks down upon the geocentrist, the geocentrist looks down upon the flat-earther.
A lot of this has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with saving or losing face. To some extent, every culture is a shame culture. Most of us could not prove the thousandth part of what we believe on any given subject.
I happen to believe that the earth is spherical. But suppose, for the sake of argument, I wanted to play the role of agent provocateur? How would you me wrong? The obvious arguments won't go very far, because it doesn't take much ingenuity to come up with symmetrical counterarguments.
Yes, the earth appears to be spherical from certain vantagepoints (outer space, ships at sea), but maybe that's an optical illusion due to the curvature of light.
Or maybe the external world is really a VR program run by aliens. We are to aliens what lab rats are to us. How would you disprove that hypothesis? Indeed, such a theory would cut the knot on those intractable Zenonian paradoxes of locomotion, would it not?
Suppose that some really bright guy like, say, the late Richard Feynman, decided to play devil's advocate with his class and make a case for a flat earth? In fact, this would be a useful exercise. Don't you suppose that Feynman could argument circles around his students?
***************************************
Thanks for the article:
I take more interest in the first part as it relates to the Bible. A few comments:
1. The census under Quirinius is an old chestnut. The fact that liberals keep coming back to the same flea-bitten handful of stock objections is, to me, an evidence of how very weak their case is. In any event, I've already addressed this objection in my review of the Time & Newsweek articles.
2. In the same connection, I read people who say that Matthew and Luke disagree, but they never show me how Matthew and Luke disagree. From what I can tell, Matthew and Luke agree on many things, and disagree on nothing.
3. O'Connor is, indeed, a distinguished scholar. There are distinguished scholars who affirm the inerrancy of Scripture, as well as distinguished scholars who deny it. So scholarly distinction does not, of itself, broker the issue.
4. The RCC has done a 180 on this issue. Traditional Catholicism affirms the inerrancy of Scripture. It formally committed itself to that proposition at Trent and Vatican I. And it suppressed the modernist movement in the 19C. That, however, drove the modernist movement underground. The RCC began to soften its position under Pius XII, in his encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (1943).
And Vatican II quietly revised and restricted inerrancy to the parts of Scripture which deal directly with the knowledge of salvation. This happened after a vigorous floor debate at St. Peter's, where the sessions took place.
<< One product of such intellectual contortions is "creation science" and
an insistence on the literal truth of the proposition that God took
seven days to create the world, with the evidence from fossils as a
kind of decorative, but confusing, extra. Even wackier, from the
secular viewpoint, is America's "biblical astronomy" movement which
insists, under the guidance of a Dutch-born astrophysicist, Gerardus
Bouw, that the sun goes round the Earth. >>
This jumbles together a whole lot of things.
1. Before the Economist makes fun of creation science, it should make some effort to read and respond to the argumentation. I happen to know or know of a number of folks in this field. One studied at Caltech. Another studied at MIT (got his doctorate there). Another has a doctorate in astronomy. Yet another has a doctorate from Harvard in paleontology, where the late Stephen J. Gould was his thesis advisor.
2. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the world was made in seven days. Would a prefabricated world look any different from a world billions of years old? How would you detect the difference? What evidence would count against it?
The Economist doesn't consider the implications of creation ex nihilo. I, for one, fail to see how the proposition is easily falsified, if at all.
3. As a rule, the creationist community attributes the fossil record, not to creation, but the flood.
4. As to geocentrism, I don't see that this is even a question of science proper. According to modern astronomy, both the sun and its satellites are in a state of mutual motion, so there is no fixed frame of reference.
In addition, it has always seemed to me that the theories of Mach and Einstein on equivalent forces and equivalent reference-frames would make it easier to defend geocentrism, if one wanted to. In fact, I recently ran this very question by a professional astronomer I happen to know (John Byl), who confirmed my intuitions:
"Yes. According to general relativity one should get the same observational results, regardless of whether the earth is considered to be at rest, with the rest of the universe revolving about it, or vice versa. (See D. Lynden-Bell et al., "Mach's Principle from the Relativistic Constraint Equations," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1995 Vol 272: 150-160)."
Geocentrism appears to be obviously false, but appearances are deceiving.
5. Speaking for myself, I don't take sides on some of these scientific disputations because I'm an antirealist in my philosophy of science. The fundamental problem is how the mind perceives the material world. Perception involves a process of information transfer from the sensible, via sensation, to the mind. But in order for information from the outside to reach our consciousness, it must encoded and reencoded in the form of electromagnetic and electrochemical information. Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox.
But, in that event, our mental representation of the external world is not a miniature photograph of the world, but a cryptogram. And the ciphertext need bear no resemblance to the plaintext. So I'm quite sceptical of all our scientific constructs--whether in creation science or conventional science.
***************************
<< Wouldn't parts of this analysis presuppose scientific realism? After all,
you refer to electromagnetic and electrochemical information, and their
encoding processes. But if antirealism were true, we wouldn't even know this much. >>
That's why I weaseled in the further disclaimer to the effect that "Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox."
So even the scientific analysis of our sensory processing is at yet another remove from reality. This how the percipient perceives the perceptual process, using sensory enhancements supplied by science. So this is a scientific description of the process, but it doesn't get behind the process. Indeed, the sensory enhancements add yet another layer to the process.
And this poses a dilemma for scientific realism. If it's true, it's false.
That was always a profound point of tension in Quine's philosophy. He treated science as the measure of all things, and yet he also said "science itself tells us that our information about the world is limited to irritations of our surfaces," and his final book carried the sceptical title _From Stimulus to Science_. How do you justify such a vast extrapolation from such a tiny database?
<< Is there a way to draw the line here? >>
Yes! Divine revelation. Propositions are abstract, including propositions about the external world. And God's knowledge of the world is not filtered through the veil of perception.
As view sensory input as analogous to radio carrier waves on which you can piggyback a message.
But were it not for revelation, I do think we'd be in the same epistemic boat as Berkeley's oyster.
I'd add, though, that unlike Quine, I don't believe that sense knowledge is the only knowledge there is.
In addition, the cryptological interpretation isn't limited to a scientific analysis of perception. For it not only works at a sensory input level, but a sensory output level.
In order for me to type this email, I must encode my thoughts in some material medium. Yet there is no correspondence between the nature of thought and the verbal tokens which serve as a code language for my mental expressions. So the outgoing direction of the mind/body interface will afford an analogue to the incoming direction of the mind/body interface.
Likewise, it doesn't follow that a scientific analysis is totally useless on my view. Rather, the scientific evidence would need to be rephrased or paraphrased in cryptological terms. For example, you could still mount teleological arguments based on irreducible or specific complexity, but they would apply at the level of the ciphertext rather than the plaintext.
There would be some loss of concrete information, but isometries between the abstract structure would remain. And propositional information would be unaffected.
Indeed, a cryptological analysis would add another lay of complexity to account for the correlation between the ciphertext and the plaintext. You'd have a cryptological version of a teleological argument, with God as the cosmic cryptographer.
Or you could still use dating techniques, not to establish an absolute date, but a relative date between analogous cryptograms.
Both the liberal and the unbeliever will use this as a double-daring dilemma. They will seize on some "outlandish" claim of Scripture and parade it under the nose of the Christian. If a Christian dares to call their bluff, this will prove that he's beyond the reach of rational discourse. If a Christian declines to call their bluff, this will prove that he really doesn't believe the Bible either. What are we to make of this?
1. As a matter of fact, a Christian is honor-bound to affirm whatever the Bible affirms, and to deny whatever the Bible denies. This follows from its identity as the word of God, the word of the omniscient and almighty Maker of the world.
That doesn't mean that a Christian is expected to swallow a whole lot of nonsense. For the God of the Bible is a rational God--is, indeed--the exemplar of reason. However, this is not a standard or selection-criterion that we impose on Scripture, choosing what we're prepared to believe. Rather, this is a presupposition of our faith in Scripture. Whatever God says, even if it should, in some cases, go against the available evidence, is still to be believed.
2. This debate usually operates on the assumption that primitive people believed in a flat earth. This, however, seems to be a bit of academic propaganda to promote modernity over against Christian tradition. A good corrective to this is supplied by J. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger Paperback 1997).
Another informative treatment is supplied by C. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Adventures Unlimited Press 1996). On the basis of comparative ancient cartography, Hapgood illustrates a knowledge of spherical trigonometry dating back thousands of years.
In addition, Hugh Moran & David Kelley, in their monograph on The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs (Daily Press 1969), have documented the phenomenon of ancient transoceanic navigation.
There is, then, no prima facie presumption that Bible writers believed in a flat earth. And, indeed, if Noah built an ark to cope with the demands of a global flood, then this technology would pass on to his descendants--and thereby kick-start circumnavigation.
The ancients, who were far more attuned to nature than most moderns, were hardly unobservant. It would be a simple thing to analogize from the shape of the sun and moon to the shape of the earth.
Likewise, one of the early proofs for the sphericity of the earth was the phenomenon of departing ships disappearing below the horizon, or approaching ships reappearing above the horizon. The Greeks inferred the sphericity of the earth from this observation.
Now thousands of the ancients had had occasion to observe this common phenomenon, and it's reasonable to assume that the more intelligent among them drew the same inference, even if we have no records to that effect. We have no records for most things that were ever thought, said, and done--yet we don't depend on a record to know that certain things had to be to get from where they were to where we are today.
So when we approach the Bible we need to clear our minds of modern-day prejudice.
3. The Bible generally depicts earthly events at the eye-level perspective of an earthbound observer, since it was revealed for the benefit of earthlings rather than Martians!
And that relative reference-frame is accurate as far as it goes. After all, most modern astronomy is ground-based astronomy.
Beyond that, it's not so much that Scripture depicts the earth as flat, but rather as cubical. That is to say, the OT sometimes represents the world as a house built by God. This isn't an accommodation to obsolete science or mythology. Rather, it's a theological model. It portrays the Lord as the architect of the world. The world is a "house" (Job 38:4-6) with "windows" (Gen. 7:11; 8:2; 2 Kings 7:2, 19; Is. 24:18; Mal. 3:10) and "doors" (1 Kings 9:35; 2 Chron. 6:26; 7:13; Ps. 78:23; Rev. 4:1; 11:6; 19:11) and "stairs" (Gen 28:12; Amos 9:6). This is picture-language--but with a purpose.
In addition to the "housing" metaphor there is the figuration of the cosmic "tent." This sets up an intentional parallel involving the tabernacle as a microcosm of the cosmos. For a full vetting of these connections, cf. G. Beale, The Temple and the Church's Mission (IVP 2004); D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (HarperCollins 1988), 78-99.
4. Intellectual snobbery has a pecking order. The Darwinist looks down upon the creationist, the creationist looks down upon the geocentrist, the geocentrist looks down upon the flat-earther.
A lot of this has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with saving or losing face. To some extent, every culture is a shame culture. Most of us could not prove the thousandth part of what we believe on any given subject.
I happen to believe that the earth is spherical. But suppose, for the sake of argument, I wanted to play the role of agent provocateur? How would you me wrong? The obvious arguments won't go very far, because it doesn't take much ingenuity to come up with symmetrical counterarguments.
Yes, the earth appears to be spherical from certain vantagepoints (outer space, ships at sea), but maybe that's an optical illusion due to the curvature of light.
Or maybe the external world is really a VR program run by aliens. We are to aliens what lab rats are to us. How would you disprove that hypothesis? Indeed, such a theory would cut the knot on those intractable Zenonian paradoxes of locomotion, would it not?
Suppose that some really bright guy like, say, the late Richard Feynman, decided to play devil's advocate with his class and make a case for a flat earth? In fact, this would be a useful exercise. Don't you suppose that Feynman could argument circles around his students?
***************************************
Thanks for the article:
I take more interest in the first part as it relates to the Bible. A few comments:
1. The census under Quirinius is an old chestnut. The fact that liberals keep coming back to the same flea-bitten handful of stock objections is, to me, an evidence of how very weak their case is. In any event, I've already addressed this objection in my review of the Time & Newsweek articles.
2. In the same connection, I read people who say that Matthew and Luke disagree, but they never show me how Matthew and Luke disagree. From what I can tell, Matthew and Luke agree on many things, and disagree on nothing.
3. O'Connor is, indeed, a distinguished scholar. There are distinguished scholars who affirm the inerrancy of Scripture, as well as distinguished scholars who deny it. So scholarly distinction does not, of itself, broker the issue.
4. The RCC has done a 180 on this issue. Traditional Catholicism affirms the inerrancy of Scripture. It formally committed itself to that proposition at Trent and Vatican I. And it suppressed the modernist movement in the 19C. That, however, drove the modernist movement underground. The RCC began to soften its position under Pius XII, in his encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (1943).
And Vatican II quietly revised and restricted inerrancy to the parts of Scripture which deal directly with the knowledge of salvation. This happened after a vigorous floor debate at St. Peter's, where the sessions took place.
<< One product of such intellectual contortions is "creation science" and
an insistence on the literal truth of the proposition that God took
seven days to create the world, with the evidence from fossils as a
kind of decorative, but confusing, extra. Even wackier, from the
secular viewpoint, is America's "biblical astronomy" movement which
insists, under the guidance of a Dutch-born astrophysicist, Gerardus
Bouw, that the sun goes round the Earth. >>
This jumbles together a whole lot of things.
1. Before the Economist makes fun of creation science, it should make some effort to read and respond to the argumentation. I happen to know or know of a number of folks in this field. One studied at Caltech. Another studied at MIT (got his doctorate there). Another has a doctorate in astronomy. Yet another has a doctorate from Harvard in paleontology, where the late Stephen J. Gould was his thesis advisor.
2. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the world was made in seven days. Would a prefabricated world look any different from a world billions of years old? How would you detect the difference? What evidence would count against it?
The Economist doesn't consider the implications of creation ex nihilo. I, for one, fail to see how the proposition is easily falsified, if at all.
3. As a rule, the creationist community attributes the fossil record, not to creation, but the flood.
4. As to geocentrism, I don't see that this is even a question of science proper. According to modern astronomy, both the sun and its satellites are in a state of mutual motion, so there is no fixed frame of reference.
In addition, it has always seemed to me that the theories of Mach and Einstein on equivalent forces and equivalent reference-frames would make it easier to defend geocentrism, if one wanted to. In fact, I recently ran this very question by a professional astronomer I happen to know (John Byl), who confirmed my intuitions:
"Yes. According to general relativity one should get the same observational results, regardless of whether the earth is considered to be at rest, with the rest of the universe revolving about it, or vice versa. (See D. Lynden-Bell et al., "Mach's Principle from the Relativistic Constraint Equations," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1995 Vol 272: 150-160)."
Geocentrism appears to be obviously false, but appearances are deceiving.
5. Speaking for myself, I don't take sides on some of these scientific disputations because I'm an antirealist in my philosophy of science. The fundamental problem is how the mind perceives the material world. Perception involves a process of information transfer from the sensible, via sensation, to the mind. But in order for information from the outside to reach our consciousness, it must encoded and reencoded in the form of electromagnetic and electrochemical information. Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox.
But, in that event, our mental representation of the external world is not a miniature photograph of the world, but a cryptogram. And the ciphertext need bear no resemblance to the plaintext. So I'm quite sceptical of all our scientific constructs--whether in creation science or conventional science.
***************************
<< Wouldn't parts of this analysis presuppose scientific realism? After all,
you refer to electromagnetic and electrochemical information, and their
encoding processes. But if antirealism were true, we wouldn't even know this much. >>
That's why I weaseled in the further disclaimer to the effect that "Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox."
So even the scientific analysis of our sensory processing is at yet another remove from reality. This how the percipient perceives the perceptual process, using sensory enhancements supplied by science. So this is a scientific description of the process, but it doesn't get behind the process. Indeed, the sensory enhancements add yet another layer to the process.
And this poses a dilemma for scientific realism. If it's true, it's false.
That was always a profound point of tension in Quine's philosophy. He treated science as the measure of all things, and yet he also said "science itself tells us that our information about the world is limited to irritations of our surfaces," and his final book carried the sceptical title _From Stimulus to Science_. How do you justify such a vast extrapolation from such a tiny database?
<< Is there a way to draw the line here? >>
Yes! Divine revelation. Propositions are abstract, including propositions about the external world. And God's knowledge of the world is not filtered through the veil of perception.
As view sensory input as analogous to radio carrier waves on which you can piggyback a message.
But were it not for revelation, I do think we'd be in the same epistemic boat as Berkeley's oyster.
I'd add, though, that unlike Quine, I don't believe that sense knowledge is the only knowledge there is.
In addition, the cryptological interpretation isn't limited to a scientific analysis of perception. For it not only works at a sensory input level, but a sensory output level.
In order for me to type this email, I must encode my thoughts in some material medium. Yet there is no correspondence between the nature of thought and the verbal tokens which serve as a code language for my mental expressions. So the outgoing direction of the mind/body interface will afford an analogue to the incoming direction of the mind/body interface.
Likewise, it doesn't follow that a scientific analysis is totally useless on my view. Rather, the scientific evidence would need to be rephrased or paraphrased in cryptological terms. For example, you could still mount teleological arguments based on irreducible or specific complexity, but they would apply at the level of the ciphertext rather than the plaintext.
There would be some loss of concrete information, but isometries between the abstract structure would remain. And propositional information would be unaffected.
Indeed, a cryptological analysis would add another lay of complexity to account for the correlation between the ciphertext and the plaintext. You'd have a cryptological version of a teleological argument, with God as the cosmic cryptographer.
Or you could still use dating techniques, not to establish an absolute date, but a relative date between analogous cryptograms.
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